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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28500540">Dear Future Elf</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/glitterandrocketfuel/pseuds/glitterandrocketfuel'>glitterandrocketfuel</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Fall Out Boy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Christmas Elf, Christmas fic, Fanfiction, M/M, Merry Little Peterick 2020 (Fall Out Boy), a little bit meta</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 17:54:28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>53,475</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28500540</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/glitterandrocketfuel/pseuds/glitterandrocketfuel</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Patrick's a Christmas elf drunk on cheap whiskey and still on parole from the Pole for decking more than the halls. Pete's got a big hole in his life and it just can't be filled with selling gutter guards or filling in for scene bands or fizzling out yet another bad relationship. Christmas spirit should have just enough girth to really fill that hole...except that as far as Christmas spirit goes, Patrick's so over being left alone for silent nights after the miracle mornings. Will Pete get his bell rung in time for Christmas, or will the Pole move Patrick's name from the Naughty List to the Shit list?</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Patrick Stump/Pete Wentz</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>149</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>32</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Have Yourself Some Merry Little Peterick 2020, The Fall Out Boy FanFiction Factory AU</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Orphans on Christmas</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This chapter is kind of a book-end prologue to the main part of the fic. The main fic can be read as a standalone or within the context of this prologue and its companion epilogue. I'd like to say I'm pretentiously clever and it's a deliberate affectation on my part, but we all know that would be a lie--I just really am that disorganized and my fics just really do get away from me like enraged elephants on a stampede.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Look. Nobody can really resist orphans at Christmas. From Tiny Tim to Annie to Harry Potter, orphans get more happy endings on Christmas than any other time of year. It's as true at the Fall Out Boy Fan Fiction Factory as it is anywhere else...</p><p>The mess hall at the Fan Fiction Factory was as crowded as ever with the usual morning rush. Andys hunched over their black coffees, Joes attempted to sober each other up—some with eggs and Tabasco sauce, others with Hair of the Dog in flasks. Petes stumbled in, many with heavy insomniac bags under their eyes, others with smudged eyeliner—some of them were downright go-getters and had gotten a jump on their fucked-out, last-night's-clothes and tomorrow's-dreams looks courtesy of the make-up department, others just woke up like that. A few of the nerdier Petes took it upon themselves to shepherd bleary-eyed, grumpy Patricks—some of them still asleep, just upright about it—towards the breakfast chow line.</p><p>The Big Bank of terminals and assignment boards, instead of glowing with the ever-changing roster of assignments, glowed with twinkle lights nestled amidst garlands of holly and ivy. Sprigs of mistletoe hung from a few of the chandeliers. A Patrick wearing booty shorts and a glittery t-shirt that read "Daddy's Little Come-Slut" perched on one of the tables just below the mistletoe with a hopeful expression on his sugar-pink lip-glossed face. One of the Youngblood Petes winked, darted in for a kiss, then made finger-guns at him when the Patrick wiggled his fingers in a flirty little wave, but a yellow-eyed Patrick caught the Pete by the back of his leather jacket collar and dragged him towards the omelet station. Never get between a possessed Patrick and his omelets.</p><p>Christmas trees decorated the corners, Yule logs burned on small portable fire pits around the edges of the room (some on the monitors suspended between assignment boards), a table decorated in blue and silver held an inflatable menorah with all but one inflatable candle-bulb lit and an assortment of functional dreidels and dreidel-shaped party crackers. Smaller displays of international festivals like Kwanzaa, Boxing Day, and the Japanese New Year festival rubbed elbows with Hogswatch, Festivus, and winter celebrations from fiction and video games (thanks to some of the more dedicated Andys) and meme holidays and holiday memes (Thanks Pete) dotted the walls. The Fan Fiction Factory liked its holiday celebrations however it could get them.</p><p>Van Days mingled with Youngbloods and Suitehearts (the ones sane enough to be allowed out under their own recognizance), two vampire Petes and a demon Pete had ganged up on (or perhaps teamed up with?) an angel Patrick and were busy trying to get the top of a tastefully-decorated tree out of wherever it'd been shoved. "Watch the needles!" the angel Patrick hollered.</p><p>In the mostly-merry chaos, at a small table to the side, tucked in between trees, a single Patrick, accompanied by a single Pete, a single Joe, and a single Andy, all wearing nondescript hairstyles and some of the most boring fashion choices they'd ever been papped in, regarded the scene over coffees and toast.</p><p>"Do you think it's all the way up his ass for real?" Joe pondered.</p><p>"I only smile like that when something's up Patrick's ass, so yes. Ten bucks?" Pete brought out his wallet.</p><p>"Oh, let's make it interesting," Patrick drawled. "A buck for each pine needle he has to pick out of his underwear." He laid a few crumpled fives on the table.</p><p>Joe tossed down some bills. "And a buck for each pine needle a Pete picks out of his teeth."</p><p>Their Pete ran his tongue around his teeth, just in case.</p><p>Instead of the usual bell that signaled the last call for breakfast service and the start of the shift, a wave of jingling sleigh bells swelled, crescendoed, and crested. Petes, Patricks, Andys, and Joes began to rise from the tables, finishing swigs of coffee, juice, and the occasional shot of fortifying hard liquor straight from the bottle. The Boards began to whirr, displaying assignments for ongoing stories. The veterans with long-term gigs have already come prepared—costumed, propped, and prepped with whatever they needed from supply to make their next chapters, updates, or installments happen.</p><p>Since it was Christmas, a lot of Santa hats appeared. Pete eyed the Board. "It's nice to see the Hallmark-movie stories enjoying some popularity. And look—Joe, you and Andy have a nice run of 'mountain man' roles coming across." </p><p>"Boy, the plaid flannel is really making a comeback. I'm kind of digging the retro-nineties, back-to-nature style," Andy remarked.</p><p>Patrick wrinkled his nose. "Why am I always dressed like a midwestern lesbian?"</p><p>"Because you did." Joe took a bite of his buttered biscuit.</p><p>"Don't worry, it's a good look for you." Pete patted his shoulder with encouragement. "Lumberjack is a good look for all of you."</p><p>"Patrick does make an attractive midwestern lesbian," Joe said. "Whereas I am quite the lumbersexual."</p><p>Andy nodded in agreement. "You do exude a certain Sasquatch-like attractiveness. Like fresh pine and forest floor."</p><p>Patrick made a slight noise of protest and Andy turned to the singer. "Patrick, my friend, you in plaid flannel are the aromatic essence of maple syrup made human."</p><p>"Manly maple syrup," Patrick insisted.</p><p>"Very manly," Pete assured him. He looked around. "Maybe...do you think..."</p><p>Joe and Andy started shaking their heads quickly. "No...nope...don't even bring it up, man."</p><p>Pete clamped his lips shut. He couldn't help but hope that maybe this holiday season would pop off without a hitch.</p><p>Just then, the doors from the living quarters wing opened again, letting in a cluster of latecomers. A ripple went through the assemblage and the sounds of finishing breakfast and before-work conversation gave way to sudden quiet punctuated by the sounds of the newcomers. Jingle bells jangled. Silver bells tinkled. The irrepressible sound of unmistakable magic shimmered on the air like the glitter that dusted their skin as they cut through the dining hall straight for the pastry buffet.</p><p>"Is it me, or are they tilted heavily in favor of Patricks?" Joe whispered.</p><p>Pete did a quick head-count. Iterations of his younger self, eyeliner, and flat-ironed side-fringe, rubbed elbows with some of his older selves, including one unshaven, retirement-adjacent, and not-so-fit-looking Santa Pete who'd clearly seen better days and was undoubtedly destined for an angst fic full of yuletide regret, poor bastard. But Joe was right. There were a few jolly-shaped Patrick-Santas that Pete would have loved to crawl into the laps of, under whatever circumstances, but there was an unusual number of young and elfin iterations of Patrick at a barely-legal age, wearing versions of red and green tunics that stretched across shoulders that even then were a little outsized for his compact frame, striped tights that accentuated those Chicago thighs, and wearing conical caps that sometimes flopped endearingly and sometimes pointed straight up at stiff attention.</p><p>These were the Holiday-specific iterations. The Christmas elves, the supernaturals finely-tuned to both fandom and holiday vibrations of the multiverse. They emerged from the generative primordial story-stuff of the holiday within the factory and served as conduits of the holiday influence across story-worlds both within and outside of the Factory itself. They warped story-worlds towards the holiday in both time and essence.</p><p>They swarmed the dessert table and after a brief flurry of jingle bells and pointy-toed tights, the chaos parted and the table was all but empty. Gingerbread, peppermint, panettone—all that remained were sad piles of crumbs.</p><p>Even the fruitcake had disappeared, leaving a slightly shimmery, wavery void around it as the Factory's multiverse compensated to adjust for the sudden absence of the gravitational warp that accompanied all fruitcakes in the multiverse (little known fact: there is only one fruitcake that exists in all the universes, in all locations in each universe, and at all points along every timeline of every universe. Fruitcake is the only documented instance of Quantum Confectionery).</p><p>All around the room, the regulars made way for the holiday iterations, who, for the most part, barely acknowledged the deference given to them. There were, of course, a few exceptions.</p><p>A pair of elfin iterations, a Pete and a Joe, rocking a frostpunk look in blue and silver livery, hauled a swollen sack between them. Together, they dug out handfuls of the sack's contents and cast them all over the tables and the iterations that were caught in the blast zone. The glittery dust shimmered as it settled in hairstyles (and on hats), then vanished as it melted away. On the tables, a light rime of frost settled over half-eaten plates of cooling eggs. There was a Patrick in a department store elf costume loading a potato gun with balls of mistletoe, which he shot into the air. The mistletoe balls flew up and stayed, held aloft by Christmas Magic(TM).</p><p>One drifted close to the table in the corner. "Don't even think about it, Wentz." It came out amicable and light, which was Patrick at his deadliest.</p><p>Pete pouted. "I'll think what I want. You are not the boss of my dirty thoughts, you know."</p><p>Patrick's retort was cut off by the final bell summoning the iterations to their stories. The four in the corner leaned back towards the wall. Joe hooked an ankle around a tree decorated with socks and men's underwear (all the artifacts of various Van Days fics that lost track of them in the narratives) and slid it forward, further obscuring the table from the crush.</p><p>The room emptied of the working iterations as they headed to the main departure concourse. Even the holiday iterations began to move out. The room quieted to just ambient sound from the kitchens and the instrumental version of "Yule Shoot Your Eye Out" playing from the speakers.</p><p>Just outside the mess hall, on the main fictional departure concourse, a small choir of underaged Patricks in choir robes was engaged in a rap battle with a quintet of Petes bringing their best A-game to a screamo version of Silent Night. The throwdown broke apart when the Soul Punks, dressed in jewel-toned suits of turquoise, sapphire, and red, strutted through the two warring factions, breaking them up with an acapella rendition of a soulful rendition of Wham!s "Last Christmas" (although if one were listening closely, one would hear some disturbingly altered lyrics—it's fairly certain that the song does not go, "Last Christmas, I ate your whole heart..." but since the red-suited Soul Punk sported a set of horns that were not an accessory, it could be attributed to some bleed-through of holidays).</p><p>The halls had all but emptied—even the Patrick-choirs had dispersed—when the quiet music and ambient noise was cut through by a discordant siren. The letters and numbers on the boards flipped in a flurry of clacking movements and the monitors all flickered from the Burning Log channel and loops of Bedussey to the Narrative Emergency Alert System. Red bars stretched across the monitors and the message appeared along the boards and monitors at the same time the PA system crackled to life.</p><p>"Code Sixty-Six. Code Sixty-Six on Concourse 2A. Orphaned Iteration at Gate Fifteen, Holiday Intervention required. Instituting Mitigation Protocols."</p><p>Corrugated aluminum rolled down over the windows of the mess hall. In the distance, the solid thunking sounds of security doors slamming shut and hermetically sealing off all the other concourses, gates, and access points to the outside grounds could be heard echoing through the entire campus.</p><p>Now was the time when the holiday iterations were supposed to adjust for the deficiency to keep the Factory running smoothly. Holiday iterations could and did slide into fics during their seasons in order to generate the appropriate amount of healthy holiday cheer necessary for a vibrant fandom's health (some quite aggressively—there were still questions surrounding events occurring at the last Valentine's Day). But as Pete looked around from the shadowy corner where the four of them skulked, he was startled to realize that no one else was around. "Oh shit," he muttered.</p><p>Andy sighed. "It was finally getting quiet around here after Halloween."</p><p>Pete wore a worried expression the rest of them didn't feel. Understandable, since he was the oldest and, well, because of other reasons he didn't want to think about until he had more context. "If there are no holidays around to fix that fic-orphan, that's...not a good thing. Someone else will have to fill the void. Nature abhors a vacuum."</p><p>"Not it," Joe said.</p><p>"Second!" Patrick put up his hand.</p><p>Andy watched Pete with a contemplative expression on his face. "Who else is most likely?"</p><p>Pete glanced in a direction that held no distinct uniqueness inside the dining hall, but it was a direction they all understood. That way lies madness. That way lies the Hollywood Hills. "Who else slides through alternate realities that easily?"</p><p>None of them said the name, out of respect for Pete. He was a little sensitive to the number of iterations from that part of the Factory that ended up in the MaxSec wing. A little too close to home.</p><p>"In the hands of the right Author, a Suitehearts Christmas could be..." Joe trailed off.</p><p>"Orphaned Iterations don't happen in the hands of the right Authors. Not ones requiring a Code Sixty-Six Mitigation," Pete replied. "Unless we want, uh, him to put his own special spin on Christmas, one of us might have to—"</p><p>"No," Andy said firmly. "There's absolutely no way. We can't even approach the gates without seriously warping the fabric of the Factory. We're not even supposed to be here—"</p><p>"What else—" Pete broke off when a clatter came from the kitchen and the door burst open.</p><p>A pointy-eared Patrick wearing an "I heart Bingo" hat topped with a Santa hat with a pom-pom that still smoked after having recently (very recently) been on fire came stumbling out from the kitchens. He sported the sideburns and the long, shaggy hair that never failed to cramp something deep inside Pete's chest and fill his throat with something he couldn't let out anywhere but here, and even here, not at this table.</p><p>"Th'fuck?" The Patrick muttered. "Where'd errybody go?" He stumbled to the dessert table where one sad and broken candy-cane remained and shoved the pieces into his mouth. "Ugh. What's an elf gotta do to get some balls in his mouth, here?"</p><p>Beside Pete, Joe stifled a snort while Patrick buried his face in Joe's hoodie. "For fuck's sake," he hissed. "Am I always this full of innuendo?"</p><p>The elf-Patrick was certainly drunk, evidenced by his chant of "Balls! Balls! Balls! Bourbon balls!" In time with the alarm still going off.</p><p>Pete made a snap decision. Suitehearts Christmas wasn't something the world was ready for yet. There was an orphaned iteration at the only gate left open, and apparently, this drunk elf of a Patrick was the only holiday iteration available.</p><p>Pete launched to his feet and collided with Elf Patrick, sending them both through the doors to the Main Concourse.</p><p>"Oh! Hey Pe'e—you're—wait—" Patrick stumbled along in his wake. "Something not quite—"</p><p>"Sorry, kid." Pete dragged the elf down to Concourse 2a. "It's an emergency and one of us is going through that gate to save that iteration." </p><p>"You should go," Patrick muttered. "I fuckin' hate Christmas. Nothing good about it when your bestie's gone—"</p><p>Luckily, Gate Fifteen was right at the mouth of the Concourse. The portal was still open and he glanced at the board beside it. At the top of the casting order was a "Humbug Pete," followed by a "Joyful Patrick" and a "True meaning of Christmas" theme.</p><p>There was a red line through the Joyful Patrick and an "Iteration Failed" stamp next to it. So we lost a Patrick. He glanced at the drunk elf leaning on him, glassy-eyed and confused. "Sorry kid," he said again. "You can't fix a busted Pete with another Pete."</p><p>"Busted...Pete," the elf slurred. "I had a—had a—busted Pete..." His eyes filled with tears. "Fuckin' reindeer!" He tried to jerk away from Pete now.</p><p>"Nope." Pete grabbed him by the scruff of his collar, determinedly ignoring the way the young elf chewed a strawberry-plump bottom lip that never quite evacuated Pete's subconscious. "You got a new gig, kid. Get in there and make that humbug hum Hallelujah." He set his back leg, held firmly to the little elf, and with a solid hip-check, tossed the little gremlin through the Gate. "Good luck!" </p><p>The Patrick elf's eyes went from teary to terrified. "No wait—"</p><p>"You got this!" Pete gave him a thumbs-up as the portal rippled and began to suck him through.</p><p>"Please! I can't do this agai—"</p><p>"Yes you can! And sober up!"</p><p>The portal rippled, flexed like the giant asshole Pete felt like, and sucked the elf through, just as Pete's presence was detected by the Factory's existential propulsion systems. The elf was pulled forward as Pete was blasted backward, all the way to the Concourse entrance and the mess hall doors.</p><p>Joe and Andy were already on either side of him, hauling him to his feet. "Think it'll work?" Joe asked.</p><p>Patrick fussed over Pete's dazed expression and Andy shrugged. "It's Christmas. Kind of ripe for miracles."</p><p>Patrick glared up at the drummer. "It's the Fanfiction Factory. It doesn't do miracles, it specializes in disasters."</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. These are your good years</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Merry Christmas, Pete could care less.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Pete Wentz slogged to yet another soul-sucking day at work. It wasn't that he hated selling leaf-guards for gutters but—no, wait, he did, in fact, hate selling gutter guards. Because nobody actually wanted to <em>buy</em> gutter guards. Especially not at Christmas. "Oh, wow, honey, you got me rubber thingies that go over the gutters around the house. Great!" Said no one, ever. And no matter what kind of Santa hat his boss made Pete wear to the holiday festivals that sprung up every weekend around Chicago's suburbs, nothing could ever make gutter guards festive.</p><p>But that didn't matter to Spencer.</p><p>Pete's lips curled up in some approximation of what must have looked like a smile but felt like a snarl. "Can I put the booth next to the Amish families who make the hot pretzels?"</p><p>"Pete you know we can't afford premium space. You'll go in with the local craftspeople."</p><p>Which meant he'd be down a side aisle, away from the bustle, away from the warmth, and probably way too close to an old lady who knitted dog sweaters out of cat hair and the cluster of Multi-Level Marketing moms who waited to pounce on any likely victim to "get in my downline, hun." Pete didn't begrudge them their hustle—the economy was circling the drain and it wasn't like being a gutter salesman gave him any sort of high ground, unless he was soliciting leads via the drawing for the six-foot utility ladder. And even then, that high ground was anything but moral.</p><p>He was half right. He was at the end of a side row, right next to the sawhorses that closed off the street from the main drag. People streamed past from the parking lot across the next road over. The MLM-Moms were next to him.</p><p>Across the aisle, was the dog-sweater lady equivalent, only this booth was run by a couple who looked like they did this full-time (he had braids in his beard long enough to almost tuck into his belt and she wore elf-ears that were so realistic-looking he couldn't be sure they weren't grafted onto her skin). The dude hung an elaborate wooden banner from the awning that read, "Winter's Whimsy—Hand-carved Puppets and Mixed-media Sculptures." Which was an artsy way of saying a bunch of dolls that were creepy as fuck. Including one life-sized Santa dressed in fur-trimmed biker gear, holding a sign that said, "SANTA IS WATCHING."</p><p>Next to Santa came another life-sized sculpture. This one was bound to cut into his likely business aimed towards families. People might bring their kids down an aisle to see Hell's Angels Santa, but they would turn right around when they saw the monster next to him. A hairy goat man with horns and glowing eyes leered from behind Biker Santa.</p><p>She hung a sign over the monster and caught Pete staring. She gave him a little wave and pointed at the sign. It was in florid script that was nevertheless easy to read, and said, "SO IS KRAMPUS."</p><p>Pete blanched and scuttled behind the table in his booth, mentally preparing for a long, cold day of desperately-avoided eye contact and no hot Amish pretzels.</p><p>Two guys in plaid work shirts came by and stuffed their names into the fishbowl. They waved off his offer of a demonstration. "Naww, you don't gotta," the taller one said. They took his glossy brochures, but dumped them right into the trash bin across the aisle without even trying to hide their actions. Pete tried early on to do some generic callouts about the drawing for the ladder, but he was met with the usual selective blindness and deafness from most of the wanderers ambling down the aisle.</p><p>There was one pair of eyes he couldn't help but think were fixed on him. Out of the corner of his eye, the creepy-ass Krampus goat's eyes seemed to rest right on him, but when he turned to look at the booth, the eyes were glassy and staring down the aisle into the middle distance.</p><p>The weak winter sun gave way to overcast clouds and Pete blew on his fingers, wishing he had an overcoat he could wear that went with the shirt and tie. The little heater in the booth that Spencer had grudgingly bought with some of the petty cash only seemed to warm the booth air to knee level and he had to keep shutting it off because it started to smell like burning plastic after fifteen minutes.</p><p>He was in the middle of an off-cycle when a woman in a red had with two teenagers in tow paused at his booth. "This free?" she asked with suspicion in her voice.</p><p>"Of course," Pete said. "It's a drawing and Illinois state law says that—"</p><p>"Do your dance," one of the boys wearing a Glenview North jacket said.</p><p>His brother nodded, smirking. "Yeah, do your dance."</p><p>Pete raised an eyebrow. "My...dance?"</p><p>"Yeah. Work for it. Sell it to us."</p><p><em>Oh. So that's how it is</em>. Pete took a deep breath through his nose. <em>At least I still get paid for this. I could be working entirely on commission</em>. "Okay, so Gutter Guard is the One Weird Trick that homeowners need to know about that will make their lives so much easier in spring and fall. We feature a package that includes a free evaluation, professional installation, and—"</p><p>"Come on, you gotta do it with the props, too, man." Jacket interrupted him. "Do the whole thing, not just the short version." The kid folded his arms. "Come on. Sell me on it."</p><p>This was not Pete's first rodeo. He's worked this booth at fall festivals, Christmas carnivals, even the Kiddie Korral when the talking train comes to town, and there's always at least one—sometimes it's a comedian who wants to start something, sometimes it's a lonely drunk who's zeroed in on the one guy who can't disengage with the excuse of other customers (there are <em>never</em> any other customers at the Gutter Guard booth). And sometimes it's a punk-ass kid who hasn't yet realized that he'll be in this exact spot three years from now because the economy is not exactly booming for little shits with attitudes.</p><p>Pete's smile tightened and he reached with an air of palpable resentment towards the little demonstration gutter and the pitcher of water (which—while it wasn't frozen over, it was still cold as balls out of the sun, so if he spilled—and he would—everything would end up just that much more miserable) and set them on the table.</p><p>The demo was a box the size of a large birdhouse with a sloped roof, real shingles, and a foot of aluminum gutter. One half of it is plain while the other has the "patented Gutter Guard" holey green rubber flap that supposedly earns Pete his money (it rarely did, but he did get paid an hourly wage for working the booth). The whole thing sat in a plastic drip tray about two inches high.</p><p>He popped open the lid to a tub he stored under the table and pulled out a double handful of crunchy leaves and sticks from Spencer's backyard (harvested for demonstration purposes).</p><p>He sighed quietly before starting. "Every fall, Mother Nature prepares to tuck in and sleep through the winter." He sprinkled the leaves and sticks down the slope of the box's "roof" and they fall along the slope of the roof in clumps.</p><p>Out of the corner of his eye, the mother pulled a whole stack of the drawing entry slips to the side and started filling them out. <em>Oh for fuck's sake</em>. Pete would have to sort through every one of the entries and weed out all the fake ones before turning the possibly-real ones in to Spencer.</p><p>"When the rains come," he continued without enthusiasm, "all the leaves and debris from the blustery beginning of the cold season washes into your gutters and soon, they're overflowing, creating unsightly puddles and worse—unseen damage to the eaves of your house that can go unnoticed for years, resulting in costly repairs." He reached for the quaint, retro-looking tin watering can with a frowny-faced raincloud painted on the side. It was full of water and freezing cold in his ungloved hand as he began to pour out a "rain shower."</p><p>"See, the rain washes the debris into the unprotected gutter, but those leaves and sticks stay safely out of the way, thanks to Gutter Guard's patented design."</p><p>It is a <em>stupid</em> demonstration, especially in winter. In summer, if families come by, he usually lets the kids dump the leaves and pour the water because hey—to kids, this is fun. In winter, nobody in their right mind wants to let their kid spill water on a box that will almost definitely result in said kid's shoes getting soaked. Hell, half the time, Pete's shoes will get soaked.</p><p>And that's exactly what they did this time as well. Even though he was careful.</p><p>Because in the middle of his spiel about Gutter Guard's patented design, Pete lost track of the second brother until it was too late and the kid decided it'd be hilarious to jostle Pete's elbow as he's tipping the watering can to simulate a healthy rain shower over the pretend-roof of the demo box. Sure enough, the water sloshed out of the spout and out of the top of the can, splashed off the roof and overshot the box's drip tray by four inches to land right down the front of Pete's pants.</p><p>"Oops. Looks like somebody had an accident," Jacket said with exaggerated innocence while his brother snickered.</p><p>There wasn't a specific company policy for situations like this, but Pete was pretty sure that beating the shit out of a high school student would not only result in unemployment, but possibly jail time as well. Plus, he wasn't wearing the shoes for it.</p><p>The two jackasses hooted with laughter. Their mother huffed. "Goddammit, you two, what the hell's wrong with you?" She reached up and smacked one of them in the back of the head. She shoved them both towards the main drag, muttering about idiot kids. She didn't look at him, but she did stuff the handful of drawing entries into the fishbowl before scurrying off.</p><p>He began to pack up the displays and posters. No point in staying around for the late afternoon crowd. He climbed the ladder to get the vertical flag advertising the product down, binned up the brochures, and dumped out the watering can at the back in the scrubby grass of the kiddie play area.</p><p>All the items that marked his presence fit onto one hand-cart that took him two minutes to pack. When he snapped the last bungee cord over the boxes, the booth looked like nothing had ever been there. </p><p>As he pulled the hand-cart to the sawhorses marking the boundary of the festival set-up, he passed the creepy puppet booth. "Have a fulfilling holiday," the woman called out to him. </p><p>Her greeting was odd enough for him to stop, instead of give an automatic response. "That's—uh, thanks, I guess. You too." He noticed that her caftan was purple velvet with some sort of fake-fur trim. It looked warm.</p><p>"I find it more authentic to wish people fulfillment during this time of the year. It's not always been about being jolly." She patted the shoulder of the horrific goat monster with the glassy eyes that seemed to be staring at Pete again. "Sometimes it's about righting wrongs."</p><p>For politeness's sake (Because Biker Santa was, still watching and so was Krampus, as the signs said) he offered her a half-hearted smile. "That's...really astute." <em>And really creepy</em>, but he kept that part to himself.</p><p>Pete was too busy pushing the little hand-cart to notice how the Krampus tracked his movements beyond the boundary of the festival grounds. Or the shimmer in the air around the Winter's Whimsy booth just before it flashed out of existence, replaced by a booth full of Christmas-themed dog sweaters, a sign that read "Happy Hound Holiday Fashions" and an old lady in a lawn chair flanked by two farting corgis in matching reindeer antlers.</p><p>**</p><p>He texted Spencer. <em>Done here. And take me off the schedule for the rest of the season, too</em>.</p><p>Spencer called, his panic audible even before Pete said hello. "Everyone else already put in for their time off or left for winter break. I need you to cover the shifts for the Cabrini Green Christmas and Wilmette Wonderland."</p><p>"Spencer, nobody is interested in Gutter Guards in the winter. We have never sold a single thing in winter."</p><p>"It's our only year-round contract," Spencer retorted. "So if you don't want to be unemployed for four months until the time-share company needs reps at the RV shows... Listen, we can't park you next to the pretzel people, but I could hook you up next time. I know the co-ordinator of Wilmette Wonderland. I think she's even single again."</p><p>What Spencer didn't say was that Pete had plenty of time on the weekends leading up to Christmas because he didn't have many family obligations and even fewer friends. Pete dropped Spencer's Honda at the strip mall holding their storefront and made his way back to the train station to head home to his technically-downtown apartment.</p><p>Ever since his sister started having kids, his parents and his brother and his wife all made the pilgrimage to Atlanta for the holiday. His mother got to coo over her grandbaby and his father got a week somewhere a little warmer. For the past two Christmases, Pete had just...opted out.</p><p>He was tired of the curious questions from his parents about when he was going to bring a girlfriend home or when he was going to finally finish that degree.</p><p>He wasn't in the mood for his brother's questions about how "the band thing" was going. When he damn well knew that every year, it ended up being a different band with a different line-up, but the same old story of going nowhere fast because they could never agree on a sound or a name or lyrics or Pete being too serious while everyone else drifted away to 'serious' pursuits after a few months and a few gigs.</p><p>And he was bone-weary of the silent, judgy looks from his sister with the unspoken, "When are you going to tell them you're gay," hanging in the air between them. Pete never corrected her on his bisexuality since for her, it'd simply mean he trashed relationships with both men <em>and</em> women.</p><p>Like the bands that he kept trying to desperately pull together from people he met on the weekends in the music scene. "Great idea, Pete" turned into short-term enthusiasm and long-term arguments and eventually a "Dude, we're still getting paid in pizza and beer but pizza and beer don't pay the rent, Pete," or a "Pete, man, you know I'll let any of your bands open for one of my other acts, but if you want cash, you gotta bring 'em in the door."</p><p>Pete papered entire neighborhoods with hand-lettered flyers advertising not just his own band, but the headliners and the papers blew back in his face covered in indifference.</p><p>In every part of his life, Pete was being frozen out. Edged aside. A loose bolt of an otherwise complete machine that was, quite frankly, better off without him. He couldn't even say he was being replaced so much as the empty spaces in which he tried to fit himself just...evaporated. At least he still took up space on the train. The doors, at least, acknowledged his existence. They wouldn't close until he stepped all the way out of the train car and merged with the shoppers heading out of the station for points downtown. But even the doors betrayed him at the station exit. He chose the broken door and bounced off, just as he spotted the "Please use other door" sign on the floor, wet footprints almost obliterating the print. People flowed around him and he almost got crushed in the doorjamb trying to get out to the open air.</p><p><em>What am I, invisible? It's like I don't even exist!</em> The wry, idle thought coalesced too quickly against a part of his brain that had always flirted with that exact thing. Sometimes he medicated that part, but now wasn't one of those times and the cold and terrible logic of it hit him. <em>Maybe I'm not real</em>.</p><p>Pete stumbled and fell to his knees with the weight of it, landing in wet, miserable Chicago slush. The slush definitely reminded him he was real.</p><p>The crush of people on the sidewalk broke and flowed around him. A lady with both arms full of shopping bags that bristled off her like porcupine quills stepped neatly to the side, but not far enough for the large square bag from FAO Schwartz not to pummel him as she passed.</p><p>As he dragged his sodden self home from the cold hangover of yet another neighborhood holiday tree-lighting-slash-Santa parade, the empty spaces went from outside himself to the inside. He told himself he couldn't commit to anything—the job, the bands, the degree—because none of those things had space for him, but at times like this, when he was freezing, fumbling with his keys in the bottom door, the truth niggled at the back of his mind—that maybe the reason why everyone drifted away from him wasn't that the missing space was on the outside of him, but on the inside.</p><p>Maybe his relationships all faded away because who would want to pour themselves into an empty vessel with an empty space on the inside that could never be filled?</p><p>**</p><p>Meanwhile, in a coat closet in Pete's apartment that was only supposed to store little-used ski accessories, a boogie board, and a pair of scuba flippers, an Elf called Patrick materialized through an interdimensional portal that had definitely <em>not</em> been disclosed by the landlord when Pete signed the papers for the place.</p><p>He hit the opposite wall (and the boogie board) face-first before bouncing back into the skis, the toe pieces of the bindings digging painfully into his back. When he landed, the scuba flippers tipped over and tangled in the pointed, curly toes of his elf-shoes. The bourbon balls he'd consumed roiled in his stomach and his head swam, but Patrick was an elf of advanced skill in maintaining a holiday buzz. He staggered out of the dark closet, made it two steps across the floor, and fell face-first over the back of the couch.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Another Night Alone in the City</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>It was supposed to be an easy job. After all, this elf had been on the shelf for way too long to trust him with anything that required a plan. Or sobriety.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>The pine needles are dry and the tinsel's packed away,<br/>We're stuck with old winter until Valentine's Day.<br/>We've got these two dumbasses, a little down on their luck,<br/>How many chapters will it take for them to--</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><em>Indignities just piling up on top of indignities</em>, Pete thought. The door was fucking stuck again. His dad advised rubbing a little bar soap on the wood to clear that right up and really, wasn't he the one who insisted on this particular place, even though it was obviously intended for more than one person?</p>
<p>He shoved his shoulder against the old, many-times-painted wood, feeling the sticky resistance of the humidity-swollen wood. When he put the deposit on the place, he himself had told his dad, "Think of it as an extra layer of security. Nobody can sneak in or out without Mrs. Lao sticking her head out the door to see what's going on."</p>
<p>Mrs. Lao was, in fact, just opening her door right this very minute. "Oh, Peter, it's just you."</p>
<p>"Evening Mrs. Lao," Pete mumbled, jamming his shoulder against the door again. He shifted his backpack in front of him, trying to cover up some of the damp on his pants.</p>
<p>"You know if you rub a little soap on the door jamb, that won't keep sticking." She folded her arms. "When you gonna get a roommate for that big place?"</p>
<p>Pete winced, but it looked enough like a smile that the elderly woman waved a beringed hand at him. "You have a good evening, Mrs. La-oooh-whoa!" He trailed off as the door finally gave way and he pitched shoulder-first into the apartment, stumbling as he went.</p>
<p>**</p>
<p>Patrick's hangover was guaranteed to be a doozy, but that was nothing compared to the pounding in his head that told him he had to go to work. The pounding knocked his plan right out of his head, along with any sort of awareness of the Portal or the Fanfiction Factory or why he was (not) supposed to be there.</p>
<p>In his pickled mind, Patrick pushed up off the couch, twitched his fingers, and cast frosty sparkles over everything before suavely introducing himself as the elf on this lucky bastard's shelf. Surely the Pole had to have sent him on one of the easier assignments. He'd been out of the rotation for a while and the Pole did not like it when Christmas magic (or its wielders) went off-script. Given Patrick's history with challenging the company line, he was surprised to get an assignment at all.</p>
<p>He licked his lips and instantly regretted it thanks to the terrible taste in his mouth. <em>Just pull it together</em>, he told himself (though why his internal self sounded like Beyonce, he couldn't say). <em>You know the drill—sing exactly two Christmas carols, make one cup of magically-enhanced peppermint cocoa</em> (and one hot whiskey for himself. With a cinnamon stick, because he was festive as fuck)<em>, and produce one enchanting snowfall and it's in the bag</em>. <em>The mark's eyes get big and round, they hear a bell and you fuck off back to the Pole and out of this story where you don't belong.</em></p>
<p><em>Before you can get</em> involved.</p>
<p>It was a great plan, in theory. In reality, he really just drooled a little on the couch cushion his face was mashed into while the band (in this case a very large high school with an impeccable band competition record supplied an enthusiastic drumline) played on.</p>
<p>No wait—that wasn't pounding in his head, it was coming from outside. The door, in fact. Repeated thumps of what could only be a body hitting it repeatedly, followed by a juddering groan as the warped wood finally busted open.</p>
<p>**</p>
<p>Mrs. Lao's door slammed shut behind him and Pete righted himself in his cold, dark, lonely apartment and prepared for an uneventful Sunday night of cold, dark, lonely TV.</p>
<p>Of course, it didn't have to be completely dark. He scrabbled for the light switch and turned on the kitchen light before starting to peel off his slush-wet and starting-to-chafe clothing. He had his wet jeans pushed down around his clammy-cold knees, doing that sack-race half-hop across the tiny entryway when he turned the corner and realized that in addition to not being dark, he was also not alone.</p>
<p>An ass stuck up over the back of his couch.</p>
<p>More specifically, a pair of legs in red-and-green particolored tights leading up to an ass. A pair of buns that looked like two throw pillows, crushed together and just waiting for a weary head to rest between them.</p>
<p><em>That wasn't here when I left</em>, he thought. <em>I'd've remembered. And I wouldn't have left</em>. The train of thought traveled through his conscious mind and distracted it just enough for his unconscious one to take over. Pants around his knees, shivering, and surprised as hell, he did the only thing that made sense when presented with a pair of mystery legs and two warm, grabbable cheeks.</p>
<p>He slapped.</p>
<p>**</p>
<p>Patrick came awake with a jolt. A jolt the size and shape of a hand. Landing on his ass. Drunkenness metastasizing into hungover scrambled his brains, but didn't keep him from (unwisely) jerking it up with a startled, "Aaah!"</p>
<p>An echo followed his exclamation as he flipped around to confront the rear assault and saw through blurry eyes (his glasses still on the couch, one earpiece caught in the crocheted afghan draped over the cushions) a man, standing behind him.</p>
<p>His build is closer to the elf side rather than the yeti side but his face is a blur beneath dark hair or a close-fitting dark wooly hat.</p>
<p>But Patrick could clearly see that his pants were down.</p>
<p>"What the fuck!"</p>
<p>"You what the fuck!" The man cries out and stumbles back. But hobbled by pants, he fell back on his rump right in the middle of the floor.</p>
<p>A catalog of horrible scenarios passes before Patrick's eyes before settling on two things. One—in spite of the other man's pantslessness, Patrick's tights are still firmly snugged against his skin and all the way up. Even tucked up in the belt of his jerkin. He fumbles for his glasses and shoves them on his face and the man with the pants around his knees comes into focus.</p>
<p>There's a brief flash of <em>Oh, there you are</em>, a high-speed dart of inexplicable ache and loss, and a sideways-shift that blurs everything that is not the color of hot toddy and warm fire locked into a pair of eyes fixed on his. A simultaneous <em>yes!</em> and <em>oh, no!</em> ready to duke it out in the pre-verbal and subconscious areas of his brain</p>
<p>Suddenly, he's disappointed that his pants were still on because if they weren't, it might signal the beginning of a good time.</p>
<p>"Who the hell are you?"</p>
<p>"Why are your pants down?"</p>
<p>They spoke at the same time.</p>
<p>Patrick rolled off the couch and landed on the floor so he could be on even footing (even assing?) with the other pers—<em>Pete. His name is Pete and he is your assignment</em>.</p>
<p>There was a sad clank of bent jingle bells as Patrick's hat slid all the way off and landed on the coffee table.</p>
<p>The other man paused for a fraught moment, but when Patrick said nothing, he sighed and went back to what he was doing before the Flailing commenced. He struggled to peel one leg of a pair of skinny jeans from his calf, then set to work on the other. "If you're—" grunt, "—here to rob me—" uff, "—just...close the door on your way out." He kicks the pants to the side.</p>
<p>The pants landed with a sodden sploot on the floor and he fell back, staring up at the ceiling.</p>
<p>Patrick blinked owlishly behind his glasses.</p>
<p>The silence stretched between them.</p>
<p>The other man lifted his head, a puzzled expression clouding his features. "Oh. You're still here." He thought for a moment. "Are you...real?"</p>
<p>Patrick tried to think of an answer to that. <em>Of course I'm real</em> doesn't have the ring of truth to it that it should. Also, that was exactly what a figment of imagination would say. "I don't know."</p>
<p>"Fuck." The man—Pete—scrubbed a hand down his face. "At least my hallucinations are being honest this time. Are you here to tell me I've <em>missed</em> too many doses or that I <em>took</em> too many?"</p>
<p>"I'm not—" Details sleeted into Patrick's recall in warm spurts of face-first information. "I'm not your hallucination, I'm your Christmas elf."</p>
<p>"My...elf," Pete says carefully. "Who is not at all a product of my warped brain or a fever I may possibly be sweating out due to being out in the cold with soaking wet pants."</p>
<p>"Yeah, why <em>are</em> your pants wet?" Sobriety was also sleeting through Patrick's brain and that was a much harsher forecast than information. "And why are they down?"</p>
<p>"Duh," Pete mutters. "They're down because they're wet, genius. And what the fuck do you care? You're just a figment of my imagination."</p>
<p>"Do you slap asses a lot in your imagination?"</p>
<p>Pete sits up. "I've been single for a while now. You tell me."</p>
<p>Patrick struggled to his feet. The room still swayed just a little bit—okay, a lot—but he was reasonably sure his tongue was at normal size and hasn't been inside the asshole of a cat for the past three hours. "You're taking this remarkably well," he said. "Most people are a lot more freaked out when they meet a Christmas elf."</p>
<p>"Yeah?"</p>
<p>Patrick nods. He can still remember two years ago and the way that lady could swing a purse like a wrecking ball. "It can get pretty grisly. There are a lot of people out there who really like their guns." He thought for a minute as a memory came back to him. That one lumberjack, with shoulders broad enough to— "And their axes."</p>
<p>Pete's eyes grew large. "Fuck, dude."</p>
<p>"Hazards of the job." Patrick shrugged. "Christmas magic is healing magic for elves," he said. "It fixes just about anything short of dismemberment scattered over a full square mile, but it doesn't do shit to keep you from getting hurt in the first place."</p>
<p>"Yeah, kinda like life." Pete rubs the back of his head. "Look, if this is going to be one of those dream sequences where you take me around town to show me all the people who would be sad if I didn't exist, it's gonna be a short and pointless trip. I love my family, I just don't fit in very well. Spencer would find some other schmuck to go to the Glenview Gala Christmas festival and try to sell gutter guards to people who don't even want to make eye contact. And don't even <em>try</em> to tell me Mrs. Lao would miss my cheerful greetings because she wouldn't lose five minutes moving her daughter's family in here."</p>
<p>He paused for breath and when Patrick looked like he was going to interrupt, Pete plowed ahead. "But all that aside, let me save you the trouble. I <em>don't</em> wish I was never born, and I <em>don't</em> need any Christmas fucking magic to see the spirit of giving. So you can pour yourself a glass of the milk of human kindness or whatever, and chug it your own damn self."</p>
<p>"I would never!" Patrick exclaimed. "Not without putting Kahlua in it first." He tilted his head up to get a good look at Pete. Pretty eyes. Pretty mouth. Short dark hair just beginning to stand up in spikes that, if you squint, you could almost call 'em punk.</p>
<p>He went back to the eyes. Soft eyes like a good whiskey in a nice glass in a room lit only by a cozy fireplace. Eyes deep enough to get lost in. Or get drunk in (and for Patrick and his tolerance, that was saying something).</p>
<p>Something else in those hot-toddy depths beckoned, going past the call of duty provided by his elf-senses. Something not unknown to him. But not safe or easy at all.</p>
<p>Patrick shied away from it, turning away to wander into the kitchen.</p>
<p>He pursed his lips. "Hey, do you have any beer in here?"</p>
<p>He pulled open the fridge to find Chinese take-out boxes, some milk that is definitely not of the human kindness variety (and may possibly have ascended to cottage cheese), and an almost-empty bottle of rooster sauce, but no hair of the dog.</p>
<p>Also no answers.</p>
<p>Patrick appears to people who need to find the meaning of Christmas. It's his fucking job, okay, and it's better than being the poor bastard who has to shrink down and spy on kids while their parents pretend it was all their idea to put the elf into kinky sex positions with Barbie dolls for their Tik-Tok videos.</p>
<p>Look, there aren't a lot of other options for elves who aren't into the manual labor of toymaking. And his voice just isn't creepy enough to land him a gig in R&amp;D down in the Uncanny Valley doing voices for talking dolls. Besides, after the Incident with over-tuned electronic sensors in one of the Baby Talks So Real lines, Patrick and Frank were still paying off the debt incurred for the exorcism (hey—it seemed like a good idea at the time).</p>
<p>But Pete wasn't wrong when he said he didn't need any Christmas magic. Patrick couldn't smell the oblivion that crept into the really hard cases. The sour stink flavoring the air from the fridge was just old Chinese food, not regret and hopelessness. The guy struggled with mental health issues, but that was way above Patrick's pay grade (also one of the deepest taboos at the Pole was the "Tiny Tim" rule—magic fixes magic, medicine fixes medicine. Medicine can't fix magic problems and magic definitely can't fix medical conditions. Not even for Tiny Tim).</p>
<p>So why was Patrick sent here?</p>
<p>Come to think of it, why did they have to send Patrick out at all? He was really leaning into the whole Drunk and Disorderly thing in the hope that he might get sent to the more appropriate St. Patrick's Day, especially since the time he impersonated the Easter Bunny. What? He spotted the tall drink of water who liked to talk to snakes and wanted to see if the guy might be into fucking like bunnies if Patrick's ears were as long and silky as his sideburns. (He was).</p>
<p>But while the Spring Fling burst into the fireworks of July 4, by Labor day it was hard labor for either of them to find the excitement and by Halloween, the affair turned into a pumpkin and ended with Trick treating Gabe to one last pumpkin spice latte while they bro-hugged and wished each other the best. "It was a good time, but not a long time" while Patrick's Pole Patrol parole officer waited a discreet distance away. Then he shoved Patrick into the back of a patrol sleigh parked on the roof of the Starbucks and dragged his ass back to the North Pole to serve his time.</p>
<p>So why now and why this guy? "You got <em>any</em> booze <em>any</em>where?" Patrick peeked over the fridge door. Pete was tugging the afghan off the couch and wrapping himself in it.</p>
<p>He slammed the door at Pete's non-answer. "Guess not."</p>
<p>"You can leave any time," Pete said. "There's a bar a block south of here. I'm sure they serve anthropomorphic manifestations of Christmas Meh."</p>
<p>Patrick closed the fridge and leaned against the little counter separating the kitchen from the living area. "Christmas Meh?" He laughed. "That's actually...pretty accurate, given my record."</p>
<p>Pete offered him a bland smile. "I got a million of 'em," he said. "My pen is the barrel of a gun. Which side do you want to be on?"</p>
<p>Pete turned on the TV. Patrick took that to mean their interaction was over for the time being. He settled onto one of the counter stools that looked like they'd been looted from a bar after the fight that burnt the place down had gone out. He picked absently at a cigarette burn in the vinyl that wasn't even trying to pretend it was leather and watched Pete watching the TV. </p>
<p>He was watching a Christmas movie. Patrick watched him go all soft at the tender parts. The mild humor summoned a sunny smile that Patrick really wanted to see more of. Pete tensed at the conflict which--okay, it seemed to be some sort of hospital thing. There was a sinister-looking dude in a lab coat and scrubs and the camera really seemed to love close-ups of syringes that switched focus to the main female lead's wide blue terrified eyes--what kind of Christmas movie was this, anyway?</p>
<p>The TV helpfully provided. "We'll return to <em>'Stalked By My Doctor V: The Stalkings Were Stuffed...With Murder!'</em> after these important messages. <em>SponsoredbyHeisenbergPharmaceuticals:MakingNatureDoOurDirtyWork</em>."</p>
<p><em>Stalked By My Doctor? Who makes these things?</em> The point was--he was watching a Christmas movie and seemed to be into it which meant that he was not suffering from a lack of Christmas magic. If he really lacked it, he wouldn't be stirred by any of it--not even the grisly parts. Patrick had Christmas magic leaking out of every orifice (yes, even that one. And that one, too. No, it's actually quite spicy. No, it <em>probably</em> won't kill you but it'll <em>probably</em> burn your tongue and you should <em>definitely</em> not put it in your armpits. Look, the Lab was testing armpits that week, do your own due diligence) but he was only good for somebody who was missing the Christmas magic. </p>
<p>Patrick's eyes narrowed at the little blanket-covered ball Pete made on the couch. It was a little broken, and while it fit in the apartment, it was big for one person. Pete curled on one cushion, leaving an empty space on the other side of the couch that was just big enough to fit another person. Patrick nibbled his bottom lip and thought of what lurked in Pete's gaze. Maybe Pete was missing something else.</p>
<p>"So." Patrick didn't have pockets, so he hooked his thumbs onto his belt.</p>
<p>"Gah!" Pete's whole body flailed. "You're still here?" He sat up, still wrapped in the blanket.</p>
<p>Patrick glanced to his left and to his right, then raised his eyebrows. "Yep." He popped the p for good measure.</p>
<p>"Nope." Pete returned the popped p. "Once I ground myself in reality--or Reality TV because it still counts, my shrink said so--anything hallucinatory is supposed to fade. You're <em>supposed</em> to be gone."</p>
<p>"I'm <em>supposed</em> to show you the meaning of Christmas. Or Christ-meh. Or help you find it or some shit. Until you hear bells ring, I can't leave."</p>
<p>Pete appeared to digest that for a minute, then arched an eyebrow. "Can't? Or won't?"</p>
<p>Patrick shrugged. "Little bit of both." He spun around on the stool and stuck out one foot. His curly-toed demi-boot ended at his ankle. Just above it, a leather cuff studded with jingle bells hugged his lower calf, red and green LEDs glinting unobtrusively between the jingle bells in the leather.</p>
<p>Pete looked up at him. "An ankle monitor? Are you, like, a bad elf?"</p>
<p>Patrick shrugged. "Technically it was a misdemeanor with time off for good behavior and a supervised work-release permit due to staffing issues."</p>
<p>"Supervised?" Pete glanced around. "You mean there's more of you?"</p>
<p>Patrick put his leg down. "My parole officer tracks me remotely. The monitor's got this really annoying alarm that goes off if I'm out of proximity. So, uh, please don't run. I'd have to run after you and I'm <em>really</em> not the running type."</p>
<p>"How far away is proximity?"</p>
<p>"About twenty-five feet," Patrick replied. "So you don't have to escort me to the bathroom or anything—which is so not-fun, let me speak from experience—but I can't ditch you to go hit the bar or anything. Which is also not-fun."</p>
<p>"And I can't ditch you to go to work?" Pete tipped over and stretched out on the couch. "Boy, are you going to be bored."</p>
<p>"The last time I had to do a 'meaning of Christmas' gig, it was for the headmistress of one of those super-focused pre-school baby academies. Proximity to a woman in charge of sixty 3- to 5-year-olds, who, despite the fact that they were baby geniuses, had not all mastered the order in which we do the things we need to do when we go potty. I'll take 'bored' over 'piss-filled shoes' any day."</p>
<p>"That's...chilling, man." Pete's expression turned to mounting horror. "So either my hallucination is morphing into a full-blown psychosis, or you're really real." He snaked a hand out from under the blanket.</p>
<p>Patrick arched an eyebrow. "That wasn't an imaginary ass you smacked when you came in. Which, by the way, could be construed as workplace harassment."</p>
<p>"I'm not your boss," Pete retorted, "And you were technically breaking and entering. Castle Doctrine says I can defend my home in the manner I see fit."</p>
<p>"I've got diplomatic immunity," Patrick shot back. "The Pole doesn't send elves to where they're not needed. Under the Santa Clause of the Reciprocation Treaty of 1823, 'Any magical being assigned to any citizen or resident within the bounds of officially-cited magical or holiday business remains exempt from local, state, and/or national laws for activities within the bounds of official business from their realm or nature of origin, but remains subject to the laws for their own domain.' That means there's still an extradition treaty if I jump my parole."</p>
<p>"Uh-huh." Pete sat back up, his pretty hot-toddy eyes showing sudden weariness. "Well, this was a crap-capper on an already-shitty day." He rose and left the blanket in a pile on the floor. "I'm gonna sleep it off and I suggest you do the same. If you're still real when I wake up, I'll deal with you then."</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. The ribbon on my wrist</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>...or the monitor on my ankle.</p>
<p>Hey! You got a license to be walking around with that thing?</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>He sees you when you're sleeping...</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Patrick rose with the dawn and started Christmas magicking immediately. And by "Christmas magicking" he meant sending out DoorDashers to deliver donuts and "cleaning" the kitchen (especially any cupboards that might hold forgotten bottles of booze).</p>
<p>He had a little notebook (all elves did, along with a birch-twig pencil—very "cottagecore" and "rustic" and Pinterest-worthy, at least on the outside) which he flipped open to the Expenses tab. He scrawled a ledger entry for the DoorDash and donuts—plus cash tip. He ticked the box marked "priority" because his glamour would only last so long and the poor bastard who brought the donuts didn't deserve even a moment's distress over his "cash" returning to its chocolate-coin state before it could be replaced with the real thing by Accounting.</p>
<p>At the last moment, he flipped to a blank page and scribbled a quick note. <em>"Subject appears to have existing Xmas magic. Success seems guaranteed. Possibilities: case belongs to trainee, assignment system is glitched, or case requires complex intervention from Management. Advice Requested."</em> He tore the page out of the notebook, folded it up, and addressed it to "Kringle, North Pole."</p>
<p>Then he tore it into little pieces and threw it out the window leading to the fire escape. The blustery wind caught the pieces and they spiraled up the artificial canyon created between the buildings and into the sky.</p>
<p>He slammed the window shut and tucked the notebook into a pocket in his jerkin. A pocket he'd had to sew himself because everybody looked at him funny and asked, "Why do elves need pockets?" But here's the thing, elfin magic dust doesn't just come out your ass from nowhere, it's stored in tanks at the Pole, surrounded by fencing and concertina wire, and a 400-yard Neutral Zone between the gate and the tanks. That shit is a Class 1, Class 4, Class 6, <em>and</em> a Class 7 hazardous material, which means it's Explosive, Spontaneously Combustible, Toxic, <em>and</em> Radioactive (in large doses and prolonged exposure—hey, the ears didn't grow pointy on their own).</p>
<p>An elf is given a pouch of supplies when on assignment. That pouch contains the chocolate stocking-coins used by Accounting to transform into local currency (provided the expense reports are filled out properly), personal sundries like toothbrushes, razors, and extra jingle bells as well as a uniform repair kit (listen—hose don't exactly handle wear and tear from the modern world very well and there's been more than one Christmas elf yipping it back to the Pole on a cloud of embarrassment with icicles in the ass-crack thanks to split hosiery). The pouch also contains one glass Christmas ornament of the stuff per assignment, precisely measured according to actuarial tables accounting for the scope of the assignment and the status of the Subject. Only the most difficult of assignments need the full amount.</p>
<p>Patrick has lost three. Somewhere, out there in the wild, are three glass Christmas ornaments with elfin magic dust still in them. May Claus have mercy on the souls of anyone who finds them and everyone else within the blast radius.</p>
<p>There's a reason those things are shaped like bombs.</p>
<p>The point is that for a sub-species of magical creature that relies on forgetfulness, keeping anything important in an easily-forgettable handbag is stupid. Keeping a hazmat like Christmas magic dust in an easily-forgettable handbag is weapons-grade stupid. So Patrick made pockets for himself and spent an inordinate amount of time patting his pouch to make sure it hadn't been lost or stolen.</p>
<p>A muffled thump from across the room jolted him out of his inventory-related panic. A splatter of snow had hit the window on the fire escape. As it slid down, forming an uneven oval, two holes appeared near the top of the splat and another one in the middle of the bottom half.</p>
<p>"Patrick Stump."</p>
<p>Ahh—home office. The cold voice sounded like the whisper of ice crystals hitting glass on the soft syllables and cracks and creaks of icicles breaking from eaves, ready to pelt down on the heads of unsuspecting pedestrians on the glottal stops.</p>
<p>"Yes."</p>
<p>The frost-face moved and shifted with the words. "Home office has determined that you are required for this assignment. Any attempt at dereliction of duty will result in punitive action and will jeopardize your parole status."</p>
<p>"I'm not going to skip," Patrick retorted. "I just don't think Home Office is correct on this assignment. I don't think this guy needs me." He paused. "Don't get me wrong, he's not hard on the eyes, but—"</p>
<p>"Absence of Christmas magic has been detected on these premises. A Christmas elf has been dispatched to the job. Home Office uses sophisticated technology backed by advanced magical theorems to deploy proportional response and blanket coverage to Christmas magic deficiencies. You, Patrick Stump, are the perfect elf for this job."</p>
<p>Patrick blinked and for some reason, an image of a large dining hall overflowing with tables laden with Christmas treats and a wassail punch bowl the size of a hot tub flashed behind his eyes, along with a sensation of two hands, grabbing his jerkin and pushing—</p>
<p>But the image evaporated as soon as it flashed into existence, leaving only the sense of Patrick being very drunk and very alone, weighed down by his ankle monitor while all the other elves bustled about on assignments or on well-deserved furloughs. "The perfect elf, or just the present one?" he grumbled as the frost-face faded away. Home Office had spoken. They didn't make mistakes.</p>
<p><em>Like hell, they don't</em>.</p>
<p>Patrick remembered bits and pieces of other assignments, other Christmases, other people. He gets to know them intimately during the short time that he is their elf, but after the job is done and the bell is rung, it's back to the North Pole and back into the closet with the rest of the Christmas paraphernalia, no exceptions.</p>
<p>The other Christmas elves don't seem to have as much of a problem sending off their charges. Hayley always comes back pert and perky, barely registering on the Geiger counter with frosted glitter in her hair and her cheeks flushed pink. "They grow up so fast," she says of her (almost always fully grown adult) charges. She's happy for every one of their happy endings-slash-new beginnings.</p>
<p>Patrick used to be that elf. <em>Until—</em></p>
<p>When the bell rings and an elf is pulled back to the Pole, it's customary to take a celebratory shot from the giant peppermint schnapps bottle at the center of the toy factory. In the afterglow of a job well done, take a turn in the steam of the sauna, then roll in the snow outside afterward. The freshness of the open wound of missing someone who won't miss you missing them at all fades.</p>
<p>Their memories of the elf become vague along with the usual cover-up that Christmas magic engages in. Like providing rational excuses for sleigh-delivery hitting the entire western world in one night in the form of millions of parents shopping for toys for their children or why egg-nog tastes palatable from December first to January second. It also gets in the way of tracking down where you might have left a Christmas ornament that requires its own four-color hazmat placard and shouldn't be transported over state lines without an escort.</p>
<p>So now Patrick packs a radioactive bulge of elfin magic dust in a padded pocket he sewed himself on the inside of his jerkin, right below where the belt cinches it. Probably unwisely close to his junk, but thus far there's only been one jerk-session where his jizz glowed in the dark (and it was a faint glow—not like he could rub it on a reindeer's nose to light the sleigh or anything, and he knows this because one time Frank <em>did</em> and, well, one visit to North Pole traffic court later and a plea-bargain down to "indecent exposure" had Gerard crowing, "No sacrifice is too great for Science!"). In Patrick's opinion, the ankle monitor was not only totally unnecessary for Patrick, but placed on the wrong thing (no, not <em>that</em>. The <em>ornaments</em>. They really should put tracking devices on the <em>ornaments).</em></p>
<p>Their assignments gradually rearrange their memories from "Christmas elf shook up my life" to "Someone...I met...made me realize..." and soon the story becomes a fuzzy yet fond memory of a kindness from a store clerk or a random meeting on a street corner.</p>
<p>
  <em>Except for that one time—</em>
</p>
<p><em>No, let's not go there</em>. The sharp smell of dark, bitter chocolate lanced into his brain, warning him away from those thoughts. Patrick learned the hard way to always take the shot from the Schnapps bottle (and every other bottle). Christmas elves were supposed to let their assignments go—go on to happily ever afters, happily-just-beginnings, or even just admit that It's A Wonderful Life.</p>
<p>No one ever tells the tale of the assignments who don't hear the bell.</p>
<p><em>This time has to be different</em>.</p>
<p>He tuned the little radio in the kitchen to Christmas music and looked around at what he had to work with. No tree, but there was a tattered cardboard box in the corner with sloppily-scrawled "XMAS CRAP" in Sharpie marker on one side. So—not 'no tree' as he first thought, but rather 'no motivation' in setting it up.</p>
<p>Patrick sorted through the box. A table top tree, made out of plasticky pine needles and wire, a little box of jingle bells on red ribbons. A larger bag containing assorted craft supplies and other decorations was in the bottom.</p>
<p>He set up the plastic tree on top of the side table closest to the window and got one strand of lights wound around it before he had enough. <em>Ugh. no motivation to set it up here, either</em>, he thought. This should be the Christmas magic part—just sprinkle some elf dust and let magic do the work. Which reminded him—just how much elf dust had he been given?</p>
<p>The sting of mild corrosion tingled his fingertips as he felt around for the ornament, then pulled it out (carefully, so as not to disturb the contents). The internal snow globe effect (sounds so much better than "radiation" doesn't it?) swirled, then cleared to reveal the apportioned elf dust required for the assignment.</p>
<p>The glass ball was full.</p>
<p>What the actual fuck? Patrick was halfway out the front door, ready to find a working chimney for an emergency lift back to the Pole before his ankle monitor jingled. "Shit," he muttered, spinning on one heel just as another door down the hall opened. He ducked back into the apartment and shut the door.</p>
<p>He stared at the glass ball on the counter, then at the box of donuts. Last night, Pete seemed convinced that Patrick was his hallucination. A non-believer? The guy watched Christmas movies unironically and smiled at the "aww" parts.</p>
<p>Such a nice smile, too. His eyes crinkled at the corners and his grin was honest and full of teeth. Nice teeth behind a wide mouth that looked very kissable to a Christmas elf who hadn't seen any action since he'd tried a dick-in-a-box stunt at the giftwrap gulag and ended up doing a week in Solitary (hey, at least in Solitary no one was around to critique your technique when you had a wank). And it's not like elves are exactly <em>forbidden</em> to get involved with assignments. Home Office is pretty explicit that results are necessary, details on how you got them are not (expenses, however, had better be documented down to the last chocolate penny, or Accounting would be so far up your ass they'd be able to tell just what you did to get those results and run up those expenses).</p>
<p>Patrick tipped the ball just enough for the tiny metal flange on the top to open and let loose a smidgen of the glittery stuff.</p>
<p>A tiny dose, ingested with food, softens up the most skeptical of non-believers, the guidebook says (it leaves out the exact details of the "softening" because nobody really wants to know that the toxins slip in and affect the prefrontal cortex of the target's brain to break down inhibitions and heighten suggestibility to Christmas magic).</p>
<p>He tipped a tiny pile of powder into his hand and cast it over every single donut. He scrunched up his nose. "Home Office is <em>never</em> wrong," he said in a snippy yet half-decent impression of the main switchboard operator's high-pitched nasal smugness. Never mind that the target in question was enough into Christmas that he watched Christmas-themed murder mysteries. <em>Cheesy</em>, Christmas-themed murder mysteries.</p>
<p>He licked his dusty fingers before grabbing a donut from the box, then turned up the radio. Maybe some Christmas music would lubricate this whole assignment. And if not, enough magic dust might do it.</p>
<p>**</p>
<p>Pete woke, bleary-eyed, to pale wintry sun sneaking past the gap in the blinds in his bedroom. He was surprised to have slept long enough, but then again, last night's dream had been a real doozy. Some bullshit about Christmas mixed with a very spankable ass in tights and a lower lip that looked like crushed velvet and rose petals and belonged somewhere south of his waistline and above his knees.</p>
<p>He kept his eyes closed as he tried to hold onto the vivid memory of those lips before the scraps of dreams faded into harsh reality. He barely noticed his right hand moving south over his bare chest before his fingers came into contact with morning wood in bright bell tones of awareness skittering across his skin.</p>
<p>He turned onto his back, wiggling his toes and letting the pleasure of the stretch thrum a steady bassline in time with his heartbeat. The sense of something missing couldn't send its chill touch into the warm fog of half-asleep-under-the-blankets. No guilt or shame, just sensation like a well-pampered cat in a beam of sunlight the same dusty gold as choppy locks of overgrown hair peeking out from under a hat.</p>
<p>He didn't notice that his fingers were moving in time to something. Or that the bell-tones were coming <em>into</em> his ears, not along his nerve endings. Although they were doing <em>that</em>, too—his fingers knew what they were doing because fuck knew this was the most action he'd seen ever since <em>Her</em> and the dire certainty of her declaration that no one could see a future with a partner with so many missing parts.</p>
<p>He put <em>Her</em> out of his mind and went back to the bottom lip of his dreams. This time it was dragging over the underside of his cock, snagging on the head in rhythm—down-up-up-down-upup-up-up, down-up-up-down-upup-up-up, down-up-up-down-upup-up-uuuup—</p>
<p>"And a haaaappy newwwww yeeeeeaaaar!"</p>
<p>Pete froze in mid stroke. His (chest)nuts tucked so far up they might never drop back down the chimney again. The voice was smooth and velvety and had never come out of his own mouth but he would have died a little inside to hear a few more bars.</p>
<p>A jingle-hatted head appeared around the corner of the door jamb. "Rise and shine!"</p>
<p>"Aauugh!" The frozen pause unlocked and Pete flailed. Bed covers went flying and he scrabbled for a pillow to hide his junk but missed and promptly rolled off the bed and onto the floor.</p>
<p>The rest of the jingle hatted daydream-turned-nightmare appeared in the doorway. "Come on, sleepyhead. I'm on a schedule to get you into the Christmas spirit." He waved with one hand while the other stayed behind his back.</p>
<p>Pete stared up at the vision, his mouth hanging open. "You—you're real? I didn't just dream you?" Under the pillow, his dick, in the process of deflating, re-perked gamely.</p>
<p>Patrick—yeah, that was his name, the dream said so—shrugged. "Could a dream do this?" And brought the other hand from around his back to mash a red-and-green sprinkled glazed donut into Pete's open mouth.</p>
<p>Startled, Pete bit down on the sweetness. The sugar rush seemed to restart his brain. He stared up at the smiling elf who stuck his face into Pete's. That face with that <em>bottom lip</em>. "Mmmf," Pete said in a spray of glaze and donut crumbs. It meant, <em>"Wow, your eyes are stormy blue like Lake Michigan in the winter and your bottom lip is a life raft thrown to me by a hunky Coast Guard who is also a Merman and wants to take me to his pearl-encrusted kingdom beneath the sea and—"</em></p>
<p>Patrick derailed his train of thought by brushing his thumb across Pete's mouth to wipe the crumbs away. He stared into Pete's eyes with a soft expression that made Pete want to soften himself enough that their component liquids could mix and swirl together like two different flavors of melted ice cream.</p>
<p>Patrick yanked him to his feet. The little guy was unusually strong so Pete shot up and bounced before landing unsteadily on his feet. "Lemme save you some time. Yes, I'm real. No, you didn't dream me into existence, and if you dream about me otherwise, well..." The Mouth of Sin curved up in a saucy smirk, "then I hope you make it good. And finally, I have been sent specifically to you and you alone, so no sense in trying to pawn me off on your relatives or friends you don't like very much."</p>
<p>Patrick brushed light fingers over Pete's skin while he talked. The combination of touches and the sound of his cheery baritone made Pete struggle to keep up, but when he said something about trying to pawn him off, Pete protested. "I would never do that!"</p>
<p>Patrick paused, mouth open for a moment before he closed it and offered a wry little smile. "Look, this isn't my first rodeo. I know you Christmas Humbug types." He began ticking points off on his fingers. "First you disbelieve, then you ditch. Then I have to drag you back and spend most of our time together fighting you over your own good." He grinned, eyes sparkling and Pete wanted to fall into them again. "So let's just skip all that and pretend you've made all the arguments and I've shot them down. You need Christmas magic, and I've got loads of thick Christmas magic just ready to spurt all over your face."</p>
<p>Pete's eyes widened as the twinkle in Patrick's turned filthy. "Did you just—I mean—Fuuuck, it's too early for this."</p>
<p>Patrick spun him around by the shoulders and shoved him off towards the bathroom. "Get your shit together and get out to the kitchen. If you dilly-dally, I might have to come in there and give you a hand."</p>
<p>Pete paused in the doorway and looked back. "Either I'm really hallucinating, or you are the filthiest Christmas elf I've ever met."</p>
<p>"Filthy as charged." Patrick stepped up and placed a solid hand over one of Pete's ass cheeks and gave it a squeeze. "That feel real enough to you or am I gonna have to go around front?"</p>
<p>His touch was warm and real and Pete became very very interested in his offer. "But—we hardly know each other."</p>
<p>The caress turned into a swat. "That's to keep you interested. There's coffee for good boys out in the kitchen when you're done."</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Yes, the tune in Pete's head during Early Morning Happy Time was, in fact, "We Wish You A Merry Christmas." I make no apologies for that. I do, however, make apologies for the skipped week! Had to deal with some family stuff that came up that required an emergency trip, but things are somewhat back to whatever dryer setting substitutes for "normal" these days.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Feeling young and reckless</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Fake it until you make it. Holiday cheer starts outside and worms its way in. Like a parasite.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thanks to everyone for sticking with me past the holiday into the dreary winter bits!</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Pete fled to the bathroom. While he showered and brushed his teeth, he cataloged the events of last night that were supposed to be a dream. Christmas elf...here to bring Christmas magic... "Be more believable if he was just an average looney-tune with a talent for B&amp;E," Pete said to his fogged-up reflection. <em>And flirting</em>.</p>
<p>Yet the more he thought about it, the less outrageous it seemed (especially as the soap and warm water ran in ticklish rivulets down past his bartskull tattoo and into places low and warm and still sorta filled with blood from before he'd been so rudely interrupted by waking reality).</p>
<p>As he toweled off, Pete met his own eyes, still carrying bags from the past few weeks post-breakup with Her. "The way I see it," his reflection said, "is you have two choices. One, you keep insisting this isn't real and that you're talking to yourself, in which case you'll just be remanded to a facility as soon as you step outside the door. Two, you roll with it, find out if 'Christmas magic' can involve those lips somewhere on your body, and maybe spend a few days without replaying <em>Her</em> break-up soliloquy."</p>
<p>
  <em>God, Peter. You don't even see yourself, do you? You take and take and take and don't even realize that you're sucking everyone around you dry, trying to fill that hole in yourself. You don't even know but you keep going back to the same places, the same people, looking for something that just isn't there! You keep chasing something. You don't even know what it is that you're chasing. Whatever it is you're looking for, I hope you find it, because it's never been me.</em>
</p>
<p>The most painful thing about it was that she was right.</p>
<p>**</p>
<p>Pete emerged from the bathroom, cleaned up and awake. A towel slung low on his hips and his hair still dripped water as he peeked into the kitchen.</p>
<p>"Yep, still here," Patrick said, waving the whipped cream canister to distract from the fact that he was positively fixated on the inked skin below Pete's belly button.</p>
<p>Pete blinked. The dust must have done its work because he shrugged and nodded. "Sure, why not?"</p>
<p>"Dress warmly," Patrick called. "We're going downtown."</p>
<p>Pete came out in a thick hoodie and obscenely tight jeans. <em>Welp</em>, Patrick thought, <em>that'll keep</em> me <em>warm, but what about him?</em> He put a mental note to include a stop for hot chocolate as he slipped on a denim jacket over his jerkin and jammed his "I [heart] Bingo" hat and its Santa companion on his head.</p>
<p>As they left the apartment and Pete locked the door behind him, his neighbor's door opened to reveal an elderly Asian woman. "Oh, Pete, you—" She stopped, tilting her head at Patrick. "—have...company?"</p>
<p>"Naah, I followed him home from Santa's Toy Shop." Patrick stepped forward. "I'm Patrick. I'm a friend of Pete's and I just moved into town." He extended his hand and she took it, still faintly bewildered.</p>
<p>Pete cleared his throat. When Patrick glanced over, Pete was blushing. "This is Mrs. Lao, she's the, uh, building manager."</p>
<p>"Peter, there's a lovely one-bedroom that's about to open up in the other building. I could fast-track your application and we could have you moved in there right after the new year. My son-in-law would help."</p>
<p>Pete's polite smile froze. It would be imperceptible to someone else, but Patrick was a Christmas elf. And Patrick was developing a rapid expertise surrounding Pete's mouth. "I'm okay right here, Mrs. Lao."</p>
<p>"That place is too big for one boy. It should have a family." Mrs. Lao narrowed her eyes at Patrick. "Now how long did you say you were staying?"</p>
<p>"It was nice to see you, Mrs. Lao, but we're going to be late." Pete grabbed Patrick's arm and tugged him towards the narrow stairwell and they clattered down the stairs together, Patrick's jingle bell ankle monitor making a dissonant clank as it caught on the edge of the outer door.</p>
<p>Once they were in the street, Pete let Patrick's elbow go. "Sorry. She really wants her daughter and her family to move into that place."</p>
<p>Patrick looked up at the window where Pete's apartment connected to the fire escape. "It's a big apartment for one guy."</p>
<p>Pete scowled. "It's <em>my</em> apartment," he said tightly. "The minute I saw it, I knew it had to be mine." He followed Patrick's gaze up to the window. "I—you probably wouldn't understand, but that place—is <em>supposed</em> to be mine. I need the room."</p>
<p>"For what?"</p>
<p>Pete's jaw set. "I don't know yet. But I'm supposed to have it and I'm keeping it."</p>
<p>Pete spoke with such conviction that Patrick couldn't help but feel a little frisson go down his spine that locked in the belief that Pete was right.</p>
<p>Pete tilted his head. "So what's your plan, ghost of Christmas <em>Meh?</em>"</p>
<p>"Downtown," Patrick said. "We're going to see the Land of Christmas or whatever shit they've got around the city."</p>
<p>"Sounds awesome. Can we get hot pretzels?"</p>
<p>Patrick wondered once again why Home Office decided Pete of all people needed an injection of Christmas spirit. He seemed perfectly game to trot around town with an elf—putting up with the strange looks on the El as they made their way to the downtown stops.</p>
<p>They were stopped in front of one of the epic department store window displays, watching animatronic mannequin elves pop out from behind a fireplace to toss packages into stockings and bend over to place them under a decorated tree while the creepy child mannequins pointed out a window at a sleigh parked "outside." Meanwhile the mommy and daddy mannequin turned to each other and tilted their creepy robotic heads in a simulacrum kiss every three point five seconds.</p>
<p>"Doesn't that seem, I dunno, pedestrian to you?" Pete asked, tilting his head at the display.</p>
<p>"I'm a Christmas elf. This looks completely alien to me. We have a 364-day deadline to analyze trends, determine naughty-nice margin calls, and fulfill everyone's wishes or consequences." At Pete's skeptical look, he added. "Some get presents and some get karma."</p>
<p>Pete arched an eyebrow. "What if we don't want presents?"</p>
<p>Patrick fixed him with a look. "Everyone gets what's coming to them. Whether they want it or not."</p>
<p>Pete's grin turned nervous. "Riiight."</p>
<p>Patrick jerked his head towards the display. "You think that nice middle-class family's been naughty or nice?"</p>
<p>Pete narrowed his eyes. "Mommy looks more interested in the children ignoring the elves than Daddy, and Daddy's resigned to his fate of being over-leveraged for the next fifty years."</p>
<p>Patrick tilted his head, getting into it. "They made their bed. They might not be in it for each other, but they're sticking to it for the children."</p>
<p>"They're friendly enough, but the spark is gone and they're more habit now than anything else."</p>
<p>Patrick watched Pete's distant expression in the glass, then turned back to the tableau and looked at it through Home Office's eyes. "But the little monsters have no idea so there's no sleeplessness on that front."</p>
<p>"I'd say they get presents this year."</p>
<p>Patrick put his nose in the air and sniffed. "Sure, presents for keeping up appearances. As long as everything looks okay on the surface, I guess your boss doesn't care."</p>
<p>"Even if you can tell something's—" Pete leaned his forehead against the glass as a crowd of passers-by broke around them and gradually dispersed, leaving them alone in an unusual little space-bubble for a few moments.</p>
<p>Patrick's elf-sense started tingling (kind of like realizing that when you rubbed Vick's Vapo-Rub on your chest, you didn't wash it all off well enough before you took a piss and handled your junk, so now you've got "Refreshing Menthol" turning your dick into an icicle). He almost had it, looking at the set of Pete's mouth and the heaviness around his eyes. "Missing," he finished.</p>
<p>Pete leaned against the sandstone pillar that edged the window opening and sighed. "It's not their fault their parents are just phoning it in. They don't even notice the elves."</p>
<p>Nope. Not going there. Not gonna be another assignment with drowning-pool eyes and a heart underwa—Patrick's own chest constricted. "I know what's missing," he said, shoving a hand down his pants.</p>
<p>Pete gaped. "Just gonna scratch your balls in front of everybody, huh?"</p>
<p>Patrick <em>was</em> reaching for a ball, just not the one Pete thought. He fingered it gently until he felt the right set of ridges and felt that Kringle tingle and pulled his hand out of his pants. His eyes darted left, then right, and seeing no one paying attention or close enough to notice, he wriggled his nose and pressed dust-covered fingers to the window.</p>
<p>The glass gave way and he passed through into the display. From there, covered in the insurance of Christmas Magic(TM) (and a little bit of actual ball sweat because, cold or not, those tights were <em>close</em>), he began to rearrange the players on the little stage.</p>
<p>He took the wine glasses from the mantel (the discreet tag said "$84.99 Set of 6") and slipped one into Mom's hand. "Time to make this scene a little more realistic," he said.</p>
<p>Outside, Pete flapped his arms. "What—how?" He placed flat palms against the glass, searching for the way Patrick had suddenly gone from warm and next to him to on the other side of the glass and meddling with the display.</p>
<p>Patrick grinned and lifted a foot, waggling one elf-toed shoe as if that explained it. <em>Oh. Right. Christmas elf. I'm still able to function and take public transportation so I'm only halfway gone around the bend</em>. But Patrick had assured him this morning that he wasn't crazy and he had decided to go with that. That moment of synergy just a minute ago felt...nice. So if Patrick was wrong (or nonexistent), Pete would just enjoy it as long as the delusion lasted.</p>
<p>No, Pete realized as Patrick bustled around the display, he was definitely not crazy. Patrick slipped the other glass into one of the kids' hands and turned him so that he faced his sister and the enchanted expression on his face appeared to be for the wineglass, then repositioned two of the peeping elves so that they eyed the rear end of the one bent over to place the packages under the tree. Pete wasn't crazy, but he thought as he struggled to keep from laughing when Patrick mimed spanking the bent-over elf, then gave a saucy pat to Dad's behind, Patrick might be.</p>
<p>After Patrick had slipped back out of the display (but not before tucking one of Dad's hands down his trousers), Pete grabbed his hand and pulled him along the sidewalk to one of the coffee places that didn't look too crowded. "I can't believe you did that!" he hissed. "You're a Christmas elf! That's not what Christmas is about!"</p>
<p>Patrick sucked on his teeth and ran his tongue around his gums. "It's what Christmas is, isn't it?"</p>
<p>"What? No!" Pete dragged him to the counter and put in an order before Patrick could ask if they served alcohol.</p>
<p>Sucking the foam off a gingerbread latte, Pete sat across from his Christmas elf and regarded the floppy-haired, potentially-jailbait aged package across from him as the elf pulled a flask out of the pocket of his denim jacket and tipped its contents into the peppermint frappe in front of him. Patrick's lips closed around the straw in a lush pink pucker and Pete leaned back (to keep himself from leaning forward). "So what's your real deal? I mean, judging by your entrance into my place last night, you don't seem to have this whole 'meaning of Christmas' gig on the regular, do you?"</p>
<p>Patrick finished sucking a long, green-tinted pull from the straw before answering. "Head Office doesn't like it when assignments go sideways." He looked off into the distance. "Not every George Bailey gets an angel to show them how many good things they've done. And not every George Bailey has a record they'd be proud of revisiting."</p>
<p>Pete winced. "Ouch. I never was a big fan of that movie."</p>
<p>"It makes for even worse standard operating procedure."</p>
<p>Pete reached the end of his latte and pushed it away. Patrick took his cue and slurped up the last of the peppermint frappe and stood up. "I do things different now. No more of that self-examination crap. That's the worst thing you can do at the darkest time of the year, if you ask me." He held out his hand to Pete. "Now, I'm all about the fun."</p>
<p>He delivered it in such a deadpan voice that Pete couldn't help but laugh. Pete took his hand and let himself be pulled upright and out the door. "So what's next, Captain Fun?"</p>
<p>Patrick stopped under one of the municipal signs with a sigil and an arrow. He pointed upward, then in the arrow's direction. "Thataway, towards The Bean."</p>
<p>"The Bean's not fun." Pete shoved his hands into his pockets, but not without looping an elbow around Patrick's arm. "I mean, not on its own. It just...sits there and throws your own reflection back at you, only distorted and even further away from where you think you've been all along."</p>
<p>"Exactly." Patrick patted him on the shoulder and pushed him towards the plaza. They stared at their upside-down, distorted reflections on the cold surface among young couples and families with little kids who ran around the plaza and back and forth beneath the arch.</p>
<p>Patrick nudged him closer, bumping shoulders as they ducked into the little tunnel. Pete peered upward in the sudden (cold as balls) gloom.</p>
<p>Patrick put an arm around him, shifting them out of the way of a smartly-dressed couple taking an upside-down selfie at the very center of the arch. Above their heads, their mirror images squished, wobbled, then smeared into unrecognizable green-red-denim and yellow-purple-dark orange streaks that curved together and twisted around each other. Pete stopped for a second. "Look at that," he said, throaty from having his head tipped back. "We've got the whole rainbow."</p>
<p>"Huh." Patrick dropped his arm back down to his side and the paint-smear of their reflections shifted into individual curves.</p>
<p>"Hey, come back here." Pete put his arm around Patrick's shoulders and their curves smeared back together. "Without you, I'm just me."</p>
<p>The couple had drawn attention when the guy dropped to one knee, leaving Pete and Patrick alone in a little claustrophobic alcove by themselves where they had to tilt their heads towards each other in order to see without bumping them against the Bean. Patrick's warmth and the faint scent of cinnamon and balsam wrapped around Pete. He shifted for better footing and their reflections separated with the movement.</p>
<p>As if reading his mind, Patrick turned them until they were back to being a bright slash of mixed colors, like spilled paint. "Watch—until we blur. I like it when we blur together," Patrick murmured. One of his sideburns was warm and fuzzy against Pete's cheek.</p>
<p>Soft, dizzy breathlessness swept over Pete. Little bits of Patrick tingled against him, almost as if they were exchanging molecules. Patrick's exhale fogged the shiny metal, Pete's inhale cleared it, breathing each other in and out like secondhand smoke only without the burn. In the warped surface, his teeth looked three feet wide, and one eye was elongated, but the other one—the one right next to Patrick's lake-effect blue one—was just fine, reflecting the same wonder in Patrick's. <em>This...this feels like magic</em>.</p>
<p>Then a burst of applause came from behind them, along with a guy's triumphant crow of, "She said yes!"</p>
<p>Patrick huffed and stepped away. The moment passed. Pete's ghost chased the ephemera across the surface of the art installation. Patrick pulled the rest of Pete out of the tunnel and back into the open air. "Come on. I have better things to do than be an extra in a Hallmark movie."</p>
<p>Pete slanted a glance towards him and shoved his hands in his pockets. "Avoiding that whole 'self-examination' thing?"</p>
<p>Patrick bit his lip and looked at his elf shoes for a moment. "Christmas is a season. December twenty-fourth it's all silver bells, sugar magic, and dusted with snowflakes. Two days later it's tinfoil, pre-diabetic comas, and dirty slush." He glanced back at the arch where the couple emerged with held hands high in the air between them. "Nothing about Christmas is 'til death do us part.' It's January second at most." He blinked and visibly shook it off.</p>
<p>"Patrick—"</p>
<p>"Nevermind. I'm here for a good time, not a long time. Let us go Beyond The Bean," Patrick said with a flourish. "Ice skates await and what could be funner and more Christmassy than falling on your ass repeatedly after you've tied knives to your feet and tried to cut through frozen water?"</p>
<p>"I give up. What could be funner?"</p>
<p>Patrick's lips curved up in a smirk. "The kiss-it-better part afterward."</p>
<p>"I can do good time," Pete said. He didn't believe himself and for a moment, Patrick didn't look like he believed him either.</p>
<p>Then an internal shift passed over the Christmas elf and he grinned even wider. "I can do <em>you</em> a good time for long enough."</p>
<p>Pete's cheeks heated in a blush. And as Patrick slipped his arm around Pete's waist and let his hand drift downward, the blush wasn't just for the cheeks on his face.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Come together, come apart</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>It's just like a Hallmark movie.</p>
<p>Produced by the P0rnTube people.</p>
<p>Someone's bells are getting jingled.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thanks for sticking by me this far! Things are heating up and this time, it's not just the radiation.</p>
<p>I'm not sorry about any of the jokes. Not a single one of them.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Pete wasn't completely awful at ice skating—he'd played enough sports through school to include a brief stint at ice hockey (until his mother put her foot down about the cost of the equipment on top of the soccer and tennis), but his careful, thigh-burning turns around the rink wore him out far more quickly than Patrick's trick moves. Of course, he'd be able to ice skate—he was a Christmas elf and Pete figured they came pre-programmed with that kind of skill.</p>
<p>Patrick had passed him and twisted to skate backward, facing him.</p>
<p>"You go on." Pete waved him forward as he made a shaky turn towards the edge of the rink. He slid to an ungracious stop (okay, more of a controlled crash) into one of the benches surrounding the rink sides and flopped down. Patrick slowed but didn't attempt to go upstream and just continued around the turn, his thigh muscles bunching under the tight leggings of his Christmas elf outfit. Which no one had given a second look. Which was a goddamn shame, if Pete had anything to say about it. Who wouldn't want to look at those thighs in tights?</p>
<p>Patrick leaned into a graceful turn that turned into a wobbly spin, then stumbled out of it as he came around the corner to the straightaway where Pete sat. Pete clapped. "Good effort!"</p>
<p>"Ehh, I didn't stick the landing," Patrick called back as he passed into a clump of teenage girls who squealed over his outfit (or were possibly mocking him for looking like the rock'n'roll competition from Emmett Otter's Jug-Band Christmas).</p>
<p>Okay, so maybe there were a few other people who could appreciate Patrick's Christmas spirit. Pete pushed to his feet, his legs and ankles aching, and clumped out of the rink proper, towards the food trucks parked on the other side of the benches where skaters strapped the death blades to their feet. The line for the hot pretzels stretched along the sidewalk but there was a cart with a guy selling paper cones of hot spiced nuts who was ready to go. Pete bought two cones, inhaling the warm cinnamon scent and grinning to himself as he realized the opportunity presented to out-filthy the elf.</p>
<p>He was kind of surprised when he turned around to find Patrick stomping frantically across the rubber mats towards him. "Where did you go?" Patrick cried as he came thumping up to Pete. He huffed and puffed and bent over, hands resting on his knees. "I looked up and you were gone!"</p>
<p>Pete shoved a paper cone towards the wild-eyed elf. "Relax, dude. I just had a craving for hot spicy nuts in my mouth."</p>
<p>"Well, why didn't—you say so?" Patrick wheezed. "I got a pair—right here."</p>
<p>Pete pushed him down gently onto a nearby bench. "Here, cup these warm nuts while you catch your breath."</p>
<p>He patted Patrick's back, rubbing it in soothing little circles. "Not that I don't appreciate the whole rom-com run, but you don't have to worry about me ditching you."</p>
<p>Patrick leaned on him as his breathing slowed. For a split second with an armful of Christmas elf, Pete's arms felt so full that his heart flipped over in his chest. Patrick's fingers dug into his hip, his warmth sealed their bodies all along Pete's other side, the scent of hot nuts wreathed the two of them and everything felt right.</p>
<p>"I kind of do, though. You're my responsibility. I came back around and you were gone and I got nervous."</p>
<p>Pete might have melted a little. "Nobody's ever considered me their responsibility before." He shrugged. "At least, not in a good way." He slid a glance towards Patrick. "When they start feeling responsible, I know it's time to move on."</p>
<p>His friend Joe down at the guitar store used to tell him, "Somebody needs to put a bell on you, Wentz." Usually when Joe was filling in for the regular guitarist and Pete showed up five minutes before his band was supposed to go on with his bass tuned wrong.</p>
<p>Patrick kicked out one foot. "Your nuts were more than twenty-five feet out of range." He turned his leg left and right, showing off the jingle-bell cuff of his ankle monitor. "I get a five-minute grace period before the shit hits the fan."</p>
<p>"That's hardly fair." Pete bristled with borrowed outrage on behalf of his elf. "I was the one who forgot the twenty-five feet rule, not you."</p>
<p>Patrick shrugged. "Hey, it could be worse—after doing time in Gift wrap, most inmates end up in Returns."</p>
<p>One half of Pete kept face-planting with each new revelation of Patrick's world—or rather, <em>the</em> world, but behind the scenes. The other half just shrugged internally and thought, <em>'of course, where else would you put someone on parole from prison that involved gift wrapping?'</em> and moved on.</p>
<p>Pete sized up the elf next to him. Patrick's expression was nowhere near the nonchalance he tried to project. "So the thing about ice skating," he said, "Is that once you stop and notice how cold your ass is, it's harder to get back out there and start up." He started unlacing his skates, getting about halfway before just toeing them off, then waggled his toes to get some of the feeling back into them.</p>
<p>"I don't notice the cold," Patrick said.</p>
<p>"Your nose is red," Pete parried. He squatted down in front of Patrick and worked at the laces of the elf's skates. He pulled them off and Patrick's elf-shoes—or were they socks? They were soft, didn't seem to have a sole, pointy-toed with a bell on the end of them— "Great fuck, how did you manage to cram these things and your feet into skates?"</p>
<p>"Christmas magic," Patrick said in a dull voice.</p>
<p>Pete glanced up. Patrick was absently fondling a plump, cinnamon-sugar crusted almond and looking at the ground, but not at Pete. Tight lines around his mouth betrayed tension that All Was Not Well in Christmas (Boy)Toy Land.</p>
<p>Pete lowered his head and pulled off the elf-shoe. "Your feet are cold, too." He closed both hands around Patrick's bare foot.</p>
<p>They were surrounded by people in winter gear, Christmas music piped in through sub-par speakers around the plaza, and one food truck employee desperately calling out <em>Last Call for Number Ninety-Two, Four Hot Sausage Tacos and two drinks</em>. But Pete clearly heard the little surprised, "Oh," escaping Patrick's lips and the background static fell away, leaving the two of them wrapped in a bubble all their own. There was something intimate about holding Patrick's foot, and while Pete would be the first to make an 'undiscovered kink' joke even at his own expense, this wasn't it. For one thing, he didn't feel like rubbing his dick on it or anything, he just wanted Patrick to be warm and comfortable like it was his responsibility.</p>
<p>The skin of Patrick's foot felt strange in his palms because face it—feet were weird in general—but feeling <em>responsible</em> for those feet was just as strange. For once, even though he was cold, and eighty-five percent sure he'd sat in something wet, Pete didn't have the urge to keep moving, like a shark had to keep swimming, constantly looking out for the next meal.</p>
<p>Patrick leaned forward, his eyes holding Pete's. He lifted a hand and pressed a hot spicy nut to Pete's lips. Pete opened and cinnamon, sugar, and warmth all exploded on his tongue. Pete closed his lips around Patrick's thumb and sucked.</p>
<p>Patrick's eyes darkened. Pete thought of pictures of the northern lights over Alaska—green, gold, and midnight blue behind the celestial curtain. His belly twisted but his chest loosened at the same time, spinning his thoughts into little more than taste and touch and getting lost in those eyes.</p>
<p>"Hey, there are kids here! Nobody needs to see your foot fetish," some guy behind a large family in brightly colored coats said loudly enough to interrupt the moment.</p>
<p>Patrick blinked, pulled his thumb out of Pete's mouth, licked his lush bottom lip. "Nobody wants to hear your asshole either, but here you are, talking out of it."</p>
<p>"The fuck did you say?"</p>
<p>The family parted to reveal a dude big enough to be zoned as commercial real estate slowly going red in the face (Pete would also say neck but the guy didn't appear to have one).</p>
<p>He met Patrick's eyes for a nanosecond. "Oh shit," Patrick muttered, his face revealing the same thought running through Pete's mind. <em>We're gonna get pasted</em>.</p>
<p>Patrick grabbed his hand and shoved a cone of nuts into his other one. As one, they jumped to their feet and took off, running in socked feet (Pete) and bare toes (Patrick) across the plaza, nuts bouncing out of their paper cones as they ran hand in hand.</p>
<p>Halfway across, Pete got the giggles and Patrick followed right behind. They ducked between two of the ridiculously-overpriced horse-drawn carriages waiting to trundle people around the square and Pete just barely missed stepping into something he didn't wanna think about before they made a hard left into the lee of a storefront and stopped, gasping for breath around giggles.</p>
<p>"Fuck—" Pete gasped. "Did you see—his face?"</p>
<p>Patrick nodded, cheeks bright red. "That's why—I ran!"</p>
<p>"What? No Christmas magic to tame the beast?"</p>
<p>"Not worth—the paperwork."</p>
<p>"At least we saved our nuts." Pete held up his crumpled paper cone.</p>
<p>Patrick put his hands on his knees. When he looked up, his eyes were bright with mirth. "Say, Pete? What <em>kind of nuts</em> did we save?" Patrick asked.</p>
<p>"Spiced—" Understanding dawned on Pete even though it was the shortest day of the year and dawn came very late.</p>
<p>Patrick was still wheezing, but it was through a shit-eating grin.</p>
<p>"<em>Deez</em> nuts!" Pete snorted in between laughs.</p>
<p>"<em>Yes!</em>" Patrick held up his free hand and Pete high-fived it. Their fingers tangled and Pete's palm tingled. He was lost between one second and the next. Fingers still knotted to Patrick's, Pete fell forward into Patrick's space and crushed the nuts between them and his lips against Patrick's.</p>
<p>Patrick's startled "ohs" were fast becoming something Pete lived for and now was no different. His lips softened under Pete's and his mouth opened, his menthol-and-alcohol flavor mixing with Pete's spicy nut-breath. "I—" Pete murmured between kisses, "Please tell me—this is allowed—"</p>
<p>Patrick's warm body against his was rock-solid and felt so good. Pete couldn't remember how long it had been since he'd hugged another person but if Patrick made him stop now, he might fold in on himself like a collapsing star.</p>
<p>In answer, Patrick backed him up against the wall. "My job—is to put—Christmas spirit—inside you—by any—means—necessary."</p>
<p>Patrick pulled back to catch a breath and Pete, sucking the same wind through equally breathless lungs, waited, lips throbbing. A heartbeat passed between them, then two, then three.</p>
<p>Patrick leaned closer. "You're <em>waiting</em> for something." The ghost of a filthy grin crossed his kiss-plumped lips.</p>
<p>Pete's teeth suddenly felt too big for his mouth. "Yeah?"</p>
<p>"You <em>want</em> it?" Patrick breathed the question against his ear.</p>
<p>Pete nodded, teeth firmly clamped down on his bottom lip, anticipation settling low at the base of his spine. He tried to say yes, but it came out as a needy whine.</p>
<p>"Christmas Spirit—" Patrick's warm lips moved against his cheek. "Is what I named my dick."</p>
<p>"<em>Yes!</em>" Pete cried. The tension in him sprang loose and his hips thrust forward while he dragged Patrick up against him. Pete didn't come in his pants, but that was just biology. He came in his <em>brain</em> and it was ten times more intense. Still, the press of Patrick's lips as he dragged his mouth down Pete's jaw and the unmistakable bulge in the elf's crotch area did a lot to bring the physiology up to speed.</p>
<p>Patrick's hands were in the way as he fumbled for the phone in his pocket. "Mmm," he mumbled against the side of Patrick's neck. "Gotta...call a cab." He breathed into the denim of Patrick's collar. "I need that Christmas spirit inside me, like, now."</p>
<p>Patrick lifted his head. Beyond the smirk, his eyes were huge and dark and drowning-pool dangerous. "Will travel time affect your willingness to embrace the magic of Christmas?" He sounded oddly formal. "I need you to say yes," he followed up in a whisper.</p>
<p>"Yes it will," Pete said. His words were as firm as the hand he placed over Patrick's crotch.</p>
<p>Patrick leaned back, just a little, and shoved his hand down his pants. Pete's eyes widened. "Hey—no—let me—"</p>
<p>But Patrick pulled out a ball instead of a dick. No, not one of <em>his</em> balls, but a delicate-looking Christmas ornament ball filled with glittery powder. "Close your eyes and hold your breath," he said. "I'm not sure if the side-effects cause permanent damage."</p>
<p>"What—"</p>
<p>Patrick mashed his lips against Pete's again. Pete closed his eyes and felt his entire body tingle like a thousand points of hot-cold zinged over his skin and under his clothes, including one that felt like a hot needle against his taint. He whimpered, his ears popped, and it felt like the very air sort of split around them. His head spun, leaving his stomach behind, and then suddenly, Patrick stepped all the way back.</p>
<p>Pete crumpled to the floor of his own apartment and looked around stupidly. The long-since-crushed paper cones of hot nuts between them fell to the floor and scattered cinnamon sugar over the carpet. "I—whaa—"</p>
<p>"Christmas elf, remember?" Patrick pointed to himself. "As long as it's in service to the mission, 'by any means necessary' has a lot of room for interpretation."</p>
<p>"Was that—magic?" Pete looked around. It was really his apartment. And for the first time in Pete's life, he'd gotten into it without Mrs. Lao noticing. <em>Holy shit</em>, he thought. <em>If that isn't the wrong thing to focus on</em>.</p>
<p>Patrick nodded. "I used a little bit to teleport us back here but, like, don't get used to it. There are side-effects." He dropped to his knees next to Pete. The elf's gaze swept over him, then snapped back to his eyes. "Speaking of—you feel any burning sensations? Nausea? Sudden urge to grow extra limbs?"</p>
<p>"Extra—limbs?" Pete blinked, took a moment to recover. "Uhh...does my dick count? Because I think I could use it as a flagpole right now."</p>
<p>Patrick dropped his eyes down to Pete's crotch. "If you're a flagpole, I'm saluting." He pushed Pete back until he was lying sprawled on the carpet. "Can I salute?" He leaned over Pete, propped up on one elbow, and met his eyes again. "I'd <em>really</em> like to salute."</p>
<p>Pete, flat on his back and breathless again, could have gotten lost in Patrick's eyes. He licked suddenly-dry lips and nodded. "Oh God. Oh fuck, <em>please</em>." He hadn't entirely forgotten this morning's aborted solo session, but now his half-formed dream came roaring back.</p>
<p>Of course, it was a pale shadow next to reality as Patrick flicked the button on his jeans open and tugged down. Pete's eyes rolled back in his head as he felt Patrick's mouth on his bare skin. He ran his fingers through the elf's hair, knocking the weird hybrid hat off his head in a sudden startled movement when the open air hit the head of his cock and then the open mouth closed wet heat around it. "Ohhh fuuuuck," he groaned.</p>
<p>Patrick lipped at the tip of his cock and squirmed in his lap. Pete realized belatedly that he was trying to work his pants down and tried to help. "Help" involved thrusting hips up, which, attached as they were to his penis, ended up thrusting that up as well. "Sorry," he muttered, not really sorry at the inadvertent deep-throating as Patrick sputtered and grumbled around his cock. But he didn't pull off, so Pete counted it as a win.</p>
<p>Patrick did it again, this time on purpose, and Pete shivered. He dropped one hand to Patrick's head and stroked his cheek. "Hey—hey, this isn't one way. It's the season for giving."</p>
<p>Patrick lifted his head and Pete might have died at his swollen strawberry-ripe bottom lip. He came back to life when that lip curved up into a smirk. "Bedroom?"</p>
<p>"Bedroom." As he flailed, pants around his knees, it occurred to Pete that this was the second time he'd been in Patrick's presence with his pants down. Although he wouldn't count the first time since he still thought Patrick was a hallucination. Was that really less than 24 hours ago?</p>
<p><em>Christmas elf</em>, he reminded himself. And then— "A Christmas elf is going down on me, and I'm returning the favor."</p>
<p>Patrick pulled him all the way to his feet and wrestled them both into the bedroom. For a little guy, he was strong. Pete pushed the denim jacket off his shoulders and plucked at the belt keeping his tunic on. Patrick batted his hands away and undid the belt himself.</p>
<p>The schwing of the thick leather sliding out of the metal buckle made Pete think about leather and buckles and he went to verbalize that thought, but then Patrick shrugged out of his tunic and slid his tights down his legs and Pete lost the ability to speak at all for a full breath.</p>
<p>"That's one hell of a stocking-stuffer," he blurted.</p>
<p>Patrick gave him a light shove and he fell backward onto the bed. "I'm not planning on stuffing it into a stocking." Patrick crawled after him and cupped Pete's balls with dancing fingers. He nibbled at the ring of thorns around Pete's chest. "Pretty ink," he murmured, slipping southward. "Pretty boy."</p>
<p>Pete gave out a little moan. A surge of cinnamon-warmth filled him, tinting his skin with a blush that traveled over his whole body. No one ever called him pretty before. He'd been called hot, sexy, fuckable, and a bastard (the guy had this trash-talking kink and it paid off in angry-sex and Pete was in one of those angry-sex phases. So sue him).</p>
<p>He was past that angry-sex phase but he didn't realize until right this second, with Patrick's fine hair brushing over his heated skin and little pleased noises coming out of Patrick's mouth as he kissed over Pete's tattoos, just how much he liked the praise. Especially coming from Patrick.</p>
<p>Patrick slid further down and got Pete's tight jeans all the way off (finally!), then nipped at the insides of his thighs, making his balls jump. "That's what I like to see," Patrick purred. He ran a light fingernail over the seam of Pete's testicles. "<em>Deez nuts</em> are the nuts I want in my mouth."</p>
<p>The laugh bubbling up out of his own chest caught him by surprise. The ripple of pleasure it sent through him was just as startling. Patrick's tongue followed the line his finger had taken and his hot wet mouth closed around one testicle, then he moved to the other, sending rippling waves of pleasure through Pete's entire body. When he finally took Pete down again, Pete was already half-gone. "Jesus, Patrick. You—"</p>
<p>Patrick hummed and Pete shuddered. It was too much. He came in a rush, feeling the blood rush in his ears. Patrick stayed on him, sucking him through it.</p>
<p>He stroked Patrick's sideburns in the comedown, then tilted his chin up. "I want—" he stuttered.</p>
<p>Patrick slithered back up and pressed his lips against Pete's. Pete tasted his own salt and musk and it made the kiss hotter. He was down for the count, but he wanted to give to this incredible creature who'd made him laugh until his sides hurt, worried about him when they were separated, melted into him in the reflection of modern art, and then called him pretty. <em>Is this the Christmas spirit?</em> he wondered.</p>
<p>Then he remembered Patrick's words behind the horse-drawn carriage. <em>"Christmas spirit is what I named my dick."</em> He laughed again, shaky with aftershocks, this time around Patrick's mouth as their teeth bumped together. He cupped Patrick's cock and squeezed gently. Patrick thrust into his hand, leaving a gossamer wet trail over his palm. "I want—" he repeated.</p>
<p>"Tell me what you want," Patrick murmured against his lips. "I'm magic. I can do it. And I do yoga, too, so I can bend that way."</p>
<p>"I just want your Christmas spirit." Pete flipped them over and slid down Patrick's body, sliding his hands and mouth over pale, pale skin, tracing the faint blue veins beneath with his tongue. "And by Christmas spirit, I mean dick."</p>
<p>Patrick laughed. Pete ran his fingers through the gingery hair that dusted his chest, narrowing down to a line leading to his belly-button and on down. He finally got to the place he was heading—the flushed-red tip of Patrick's cock—and swallowed it down.</p>
<p>It was Patrick's turn to laugh out loud, little flutters of his belly against Pete's cheek as he licked up one side, circled the crown, and dropped back down. Pete let himself get into it. He wanted to make Patrick feel good. He tilted his head, angled his jaw, wrapped his fingers around the base, checking in with glances up at Patrick's rapt face. When Patrick licked his bottom lip, Pete moaned and ground against the bedclothes. He just might be ready to go again sooner than he thought.</p>
<p>"So good," Patrick murmured. His hips had begun to move and Pete leaned into it. Patrick's breaths were coming faster. "Not long—you sure?"</p>
<p>Pete nodded and hummed, mouth full. With his nose buried in the red-gold thatch, he was surrounded by Patrick's scent. At first, he smelled like Pete would expect any guy to smell like, but as he got closer, Pete started to smell warm gingerbread.</p>
<p>He paused and lifted his head. "Is it normal for you to smell delicious?"</p>
<p>Patrick was staring at him, cheeks flushed. His mouth dropped open. "I—uh—huh?"</p>
<p>"You smell like cookies. Not that I'm complaining but—"</p>
<p>"Oh, that." Patrick flopped back and whimpered a little when Pete's finger and thumb tightened around the base of his cock. "It's an elf thing. Please don't make me explain it right now." His flushed face took on a pained expression.</p>
<p>"No problem," Pete replied and dipped back down to business. Patrick's moans piled on top of each other, coming faster as he swiveled his hips with Pete's movements.</p>
<p>"So good," he said again. "Pete—so good—gonna—"</p>
<p>"Yeah," Pete said around a mouthful of Christmas Spirit.</p>
<p>"Gonna—<em>Oh!</em>" Patrick folded in half as he came off the bed.</p>
<p>Pete's lips tingled as his mouth was flooded.</p>
<p>He expected salt.</p>
<p>It was not salty.</p>
<p>Patrick flopped back down, chest heaving.</p>
<p>Pete swallowed a mouthful but there was some...overflow and he coughed. It dribbled out onto his bottom lip.</p>
<p>Patrick's head was thrown all the way back, showing off the pale skin of his neck. "Don't judge." He reached down and swiped his thumb across the corner of Pete's mouth, then dragged him up to cuddle.</p>
<p>The solid thump of Patrick's heartbeat under his cheek pulsed in time with Pete's. "Icing?" He asked again after he felt like he could breathe again, then lifted his head in alarm. "Is that how all those Christmas cookies—"</p>
<p>Patrick shoved him over, giggling. "Asshole. It's just a side-effect of being an elf." He squirmed until he found the corner of the comforter and shook it free. "Doesn't happen all the time, it's just—the Christmas concentrates build up over time. Go too long and it's noticeable." Patrick ducked his head, smile fading. "It's been...a minute for me."</p>
<p>Pete felt a curl of guilt. "Hey, I got dumped not too long ago. She ranted at me. And then turned it into a blog post. It went viral."</p>
<p>Patrick picked at the comforter. "I told you where I've been for five years."</p>
<p>Pete stroked his side. "Hey, I'm not one to judge." He glanced up at Patrick's expression. "Not over your jizz, either. It was just...unexpected. You get a taste in your mouth for sausage and you get cake."</p>
<p>"I get that a lot," Patrick said. "Back at the Pole, there's one right way to bring Christmas spirit to an assignment. It's not a way I'm always good at."</p>
<p>"Hey, you were great the way we just did it. Do I need to fill out a customer satisfaction card or something?"</p>
<p>Patrick tugged on his ear. "You have to hear a bell, remember? Once the bell is rung, the assignment is done and Home Office calls for an extraction."</p>
<p>"I didn't hear any bells," Pete said. <em>And if it means Patrick has to leave, I might never hear a goddamn thing</em>. It was a dangerous thought, heavy and solemn for a guy who'd just swallowed a mouthful of icing-jizz and kinda wanted to do it again. "Maybe you should put your dick in my ear next."</p>
<p>Patrick snorted. "I have a list. Ear-fucking is not on it." He leaned over and dug around in his pile of discarded clothes until he came up with a tiny journal.</p>
<p>"What's next on the list?"</p>
<p>He glanced down, then smirked.</p>
<p>"What?" Pete propped up on his elbows.</p>
<p>"Next on the list is making cookies." Patrick's impish grin returned and he gestured to his crotch. "So I'm gonna need you to get back to work."</p>
<p>Pete burst out laughing and rolled over, pinning Patrick to the bed again. "Now there's the Christmas elf I know and love."</p>
<p>Patrick's grin froze. He pushed at Pete until he fell to one side. "You don't love your elf," he said quietly, rolling away to the opposite side of the bed.</p>
<p>Pete, startled at the edge he heard in Patrick's voice, curled in on himself. The bottom dropped out of his stomach. <em>Great, Wentz. You fucked it up somehow</em>. "Hey—what's the matter?" He ducked his head. "What'd I do?"</p>
<p>Patrick took a final deep breath before exhaling, then shook his head. "It's not you, it's—look, we had fun, yeah?"</p>
<p>Pete nodded vigorously. "Fuck yeah. But like—I thought this was allowed. You said—"</p>
<p>Patrick ducked his head again. "Yeah, it's allowed. Just—people don't <em>love</em> elves. I'm your <em>Christmas</em> elf. 'Tis the season and all that."</p>
<p>Pete frowned. He pushed up to a sitting position. "Should we pretend like this never happened? Write it off as a one-shot?" He wanted to ask more questions. Questions like who did Patrick's bosses think they were to tell people who they could and could not love. Questions like what would happen if someone did want their elf to stick around after the new year.</p>
<p>Patrick threw a glance over his shoulder. It wasn't as closed-off as Pete expected and he didn't know what to think when Patrick said, "I counted a lot more than one shot." But he didn't expect to feel a hot curl low and deep twist up to obscure the black ice under his feet.</p>
<p><em>There are two sides to every double entendre</em>, Pete thought. "Was it a misfire?"</p>
<p>"No!" Patrick's answer was quick enough to be denial but sincere enough to feel like the truth. Or enough of it.</p>
<p>Patrick stood and stretched. "Just—" He took a deep breath, then crawled back onto the bed next to Pete. "I'm here for a good time, not a long time, okay?"</p>
<p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I'm sorry for this chapter ending, though.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Just a matter of time (until we're all found out)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Look, there are two lists. The Naughty List, and the Nice List. "It's Complicated," doesn't belong in either of them. But then again, Patrick's not exactly making it easy on himself, is he?</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you for sticking with me through the Covid-wall which I've finally hit. Fandom is my bright spot.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Christmas is all about wanting things—presents, good cheer, rich food, peace on earth—and Christmas elves are practically made up of want. One look at the lazy, languid expression on Pete's face and Patrick <em>wanted</em>. He <em>remembered</em> wanting. In a faded-love that he never before experienced, yet had always been there.</p>
<p><em>Here for a good time, not a long time</em>, he told himself. They ordered pizza and in the time it took for the delivery to make it, Pete learned that sometimes it only <em>looked</em> like icing. His lips were still red and puffy when he answered the door in a pair of old basketball shorts that didn't do a thing to hide his boner. But Patrick more than made up for it on the couch after he won the thumb war and insisted on Die Hard ("Yes it is so a fucking Christmas movie! His wife's name is Holly!") rather than "Spied On By My Mechanic...At Christmas!"</p>
<p>They fell asleep curled around each other, then Patrick sort of schlepped Pete to the bedroom when the DVD menu music got annoying enough to penetrate their doze. As he dropped Pete down into the messy pile of comforter, sheets, and one towel with stiff patches that Patrick dug out and threw across the room, Pete became an octopus.</p>
<p>"Mmm, stay here...bed cold..." Pete tangled his arms in Patrick's clothes and tugged.</p>
<p>Patrick went down on one knee, face planted in the crook of Pete's neck, smelling warm and sweat and maybe a little pepperoni grease. He buried his nose in it and inhaled, then pulled back.</p>
<p>"Noo," Pete mumbled.</p>
<p>Patrick pushed a pile of blankets on top of him and extricated himself. "Shh. I'm just going to lock up and turn off the lights."</p>
<p>"Come back." Pete made grabby hands. "Swear on y'r—y'r elf-thingy." He made a wavy gesture in the general direction of Patrick's crotch.</p>
<p>Patrick cupped his junk. "Yeah, yeah."</p>
<p>Pete cracked an eye open and it shone, bright as candlelight through bourbon. "Swear," he repeated, sleep and some indefinable edge roughening his tone.</p>
<p>For a nanosecond, he could see it—a cleared-off half of the medicine cabinet. Three stools at the breakfast bar. The other side of the couch. The empty side of the bed. <em>The little spoon</em>. Patrick's breath caught. Something behind his ribcage twisted. He <em>wanted</em>. He found himself nodding. "Pinkie-swear."</p>
<p>The moment passed and the intense look drained from Pete's gaze. His teeth flashed from underneath the pile of blankets and his eyes drifted closed once more.</p>
<p>Patrick just shook his head. He drew in a shaky breath. "Weirdo."</p>
<p>He crept out of the bedroom and started turning out the lights. He turned off the DVD player and the TV, brought the empty beer bottles and pizza box and dirty plates into the kitchen, separating the washables from the recyclables from the trash without a thought for his actions while his mind replayed the little moments—Pete peeking out from under the blanket. Their reflections blurring together in the Bean. The constant, low-grade awareness of Pete during their day, then the hollow streak of panic when he looked up from the ice rink to find Pete gone.</p>
<p>He paused at the sink, a half-drunk beer bottle in his hand. Of course, Pete meant for him to swear nothing more than to come back to his bed. <em>A good time, not a long time</em>, he reminded himself.</p>
<p>When he was given this assignment, Patrick told himself he'd take a safer approach. One that wouldn't become...entangled. He shied away from every memory, even when he wanted to reach for the details to remind himself. Five years in the klink made everything blurry except the printed patterns on wrapping paper and it wasn't like Home Office would admit to having any sort of record of a colossal failure—even now, his hand tightened around the bottle and he brought it to his lips.</p>
<p><em>I should have been the villain</em>, he thought, even as he scoffed at his own idea. He didn't have a moustache to twirl, but sideburns might have worked in a pinch. He used to—<em>used to</em>, mind—clean up pretty well with a haircut and a suit and a fedora instead of the trucker hat. He once wore a red suit—no, not <em>that</em> one, a tailored one—and devil horns for one particularly troublesome case involving a middle-aged divorcee and her childhood crush unable to get their shit together without an intervention.</p>
<p><em>I liked that one</em>. He got to play a flamboyant bad-boy rock musician who flirted outrageously with both of them in between high-energy sets that let him gyrate against a sweet guitar. Turned out they just needed to get mad about the same thing.</p>
<p>Pete didn't need to get mad about anything. And Patrick didn't want Pete mad at him anyway. He wanted that exhilarated rush he felt running across the plaza in their socks, nuts flying, giggling like idiots, and laughing into each other's mouths between kisses.</p>
<p>Besides, his appearance now reflected who he'd been the past five years—a half-step up from a shaggy-haired bum living in a van down by the river (or the minimum-security wing of the gift wrap gulag and unwilling to let any of the inmates anywhere near his neck or face with a pair of shears for any reason, thank you very much). Definitely not villain material.</p>
<p>He had no reason and no call and <em>no excuse</em> to play the aggressive, handsy type who drives the main character into the arms of the wholesome hometown hero, either. Pete wasn't pining over a missed connection or a lost love.</p>
<p>Then he had to go and open that bedroom door this morning.</p>
<p>Patrick was very much <em>not</em> an elf on the shelf. Patrick had stamina. Any elf who could keep (it) up as the Easter Bunny for almost an entire year deserves credit. And anyone who's done a nickel in the Kringle Klink has a lot of built-up...tension. Put the two together and Patrick sat on a powder keg of pent-up libido, more than a tinge of rebellion against authority, and a large quantity of Schedule II controlled substance.</p>
<p>The sight of a sleep-soft Pete, one arm over his head and the other moving lazily under the sheet, and Patrick's brain blew a gasket higher than the last industrial accident at the Toy Factory (the fallout had everyone gagging for months afterward). This time (again), Patrick <em>wanted</em>.</p>
<p>The last time Patrick <em>wanted</em>, though?</p>
<p>It fucking <em>hurt</em>.</p>
<p>He sighed and headed out into the living room. Fuck things right up if his assignment ended up being part of some holiday heist so he double-checked the lock and threw the deadbolt so no intruders got in.</p>
<p>He was halfway back to the bedroom when he realized he was too late.</p>
<p>A skirl of frigid air teased a finger down the back of his neck. He whirled and darted back to the living room to find it no longer empty, but dominated by a monstrous figure with a shaggy, rust-colored mane and horns arcing up from the top of its forehead. A long, tattered robe hung off its shoulders, ending just above its knees (which were furred and bent backward, not actually being knees).</p>
<p>"Gah! Krampus!" Patrick dropped into a defensive crouch and hissed, hackles up like a cat.</p>
<p>The horned beast's features were fixed, if not in a permanent snarl, then at least in a permanent expression indicating the awareness of something gone bad in the fridge. Arctic air circled through the room from the open window leading to the fire escape and a film of frost fell over the glass top of the coffee table. The beast put clawed hands on its hips and tapped a hoof with an expectant air.</p>
<p>"Is that any way to greet your parole officer?"</p>
<p>Patrick sagged against the door to the hallway. "Fuck, Andy, warn an elf, wouldja?" He glanced back down the darkened hallway, listening for signs of life from Pete's bedroom. "What—what are you doing here? Is it because of this afternoon? We were apart for five minutes and he got a little too far—"</p>
<p>"Seems like you got him back and got real close." Andy arched a wooly eyebrow, those ice-chip blue eyes shining out from the ruddy skin and making his grimace look just a little more sardonic than terrifying. He shook his head, mindful of the ceiling fan. "You sure that's such a good idea?"</p>
<p>Patrick slid across the hallway back into the kitchen, keeping the breakfast bar between him and the Krampus. "There's nothing in the rules that says you can't play with roles in service to the mission." Andy couldn't read minds—no one but The Kringle could do that—but the Kringle wasn't the only one who kept a naughty list. Of course, being his parole officer, Andy's list came from the Department of Corrections and included weekly check-ins.</p>
<p>But Patrick couldn't shake the uneasy feeling that Andy had been tuning into his earlier thoughts with those horns of his. While Patrick wouldn't be the first elf to become involved with an assignment, he still felt defensive about it. "<em>Somebody</em> has to play all those high-powered, career-focused exes to show the assignments how empty their lives are without the Magic of Christmas(TM)," he said. "And Home Office's 'don't ask, don't tell' policy is in force."</p>
<p>"Provided the mission is a success," Andy replied. He hunkered down on his haunches, fitting his backward knees on the couch, and rested his forearms on the backrest. "Nothing in the file says anything about needing a villain role. That's why I recommended you for this one. No job that anyone would want, no adorable property in danger of demolition in favor of a mini-mall—"</p>
<p>"His landlady thinks this place is too big for him. She wants her daughter's family to move in. Andy, you should have seen his face when I asked him about it."</p>
<p>Andy glanced around. "Well, it <em>is</em> a pretty nice place. Three bedrooms, central location, very nice alley for skulking around in—what more could you ask for?" He leveled a shrewd glance at Patrick. "Except, of course, some Christmas spirit."</p>
<p>Patrick immediately thought of the <em>Christmas spirit</em> Pete had so gleefully swallowed down and busied himself reaching for the beer bottle again. He tipped the bottle back so fast that the liquid hit the back of his throat and made him sputter. "Uh—" Elves from the north were traditionally very fair-skinned, and the additional merriment of the elfin complexion meant that when Patrick blushed, he lit up like, well, a Christmas tree.</p>
<p>Andy's wry tone came with an arched eyebrow. "Patrick, Home Office is not opposed to any employee taking on the right role for the job. I specifically picked one that called for a merry pixie buddy, or a wise wingman ready to give him a nudge in the right direction and have a little faith in the season, not—"</p>
<p>"What?" Patrick frowned, lips still around the beer bottle. "Playing the aggressive suitor is a legit strategy. Maybe I'm just priming him—"</p>
<p>Andy's eyebrows stop him from finishing that thought. "Does he have a small business in an easily take-over-able cottage industry?"</p>
<p>Patrick hunched his shoulders. "Not that I can tell. Something in sales, I think. Hey, maybe that makes <em>him</em> the aggressive one who needs to slow down and—"</p>
<p>"Yeah, I'm gonna say no on that one," Andy said. "I've seen the file, Patrick. Show him some Christmas spirit, ring his bell—no, <em>that</em> one doesn't count—and get the job done."</p>
<p>Patrick finished the last of the beer and set the bottle in the recycling bin. "Have you talked to Home Office?" At Andy's head-shake, Patrick continued. "Well, I did. Look, the guy watches Christmas movies without provocation." Patrick pointed to the box. "That's his Christmas stuff, all out and ready to go."</p>
<p>"Why isn't it up?"</p>
<p>Patrick shrugged. "Lots of people don't put their trees up until a few days before. My point is that a guy that watches Lifetime dramas with '...at Christmas!' attached is not a guy in need of a Christmas elf to jerk off his Christmas spirit."</p>
<p>The sound of a faint cough came from the bedrooms and Patrick's eyes widened.</p>
<p>Andy lifted his head, his horns practically quivering.</p>
<p>After a moment, light snores filtered out. Patrick came out from around the breakfast bar and slumped down onto the couch. "There's something weird about this assignment," he began.</p>
<p>"Patrick, no." Andy's voice was gentle. Plaintive. Sympathetic. The last thing anybody expected out of a Krampus. "You can't do this to yourself again."</p>
<p>Of course, that was also what made him such an effective Krampus. Tell a naughty twelve-year-old that you'll eat their toes for smarting off and they'll start unlacing their shoes for you. Tell them in a soft, kind voice that you're not <em>angry</em>, you're just <em>disappointed</em> and they fold like a cheap mall-Santa costume.</p>
<p>It worked on elves, too. Patrick's mouth tightened and he ducked his head. "Andy—"</p>
<p>The Krampus held up one hand, his nails tipped with the glimmerings of frost. "I'mma stop you right there, brother. You know how this goes." The last was delivered with gentle encouragement. "I just need you to say the words."</p>
<p>Patrick sighed and covered his mouth with one hand. "Ehh...yep." He drew in a deep breath and began to recite from memory. "I, Patrick Stump, as a duly designated Christmas elf attached to an official assignment authorized by Home Office, do hereby acknowledge that I am in control of myself and my faculties. I do assert that all the tools and controlled substances signed out under my care are still in my possession—" he paused to pat his hips and faltered.</p>
<p>"Patrick, you're not wearing pants," Andy said helpfully.</p>
<p>Patrick glanced down. "Huh. So I'm not. They're back in the bedroom. I'll just—"</p>
<p>Andy waved a clawed hand. "Feh, they're within reach for technical purposes. Finish up so I can file the paperwork before the end of my shift. The sleigh is double-parked and I left the reindeer running."</p>
<p>Patrick rolled his eyes and huffed. "And I do solemnly swear, under penalty of incarceration, that I am performing my duty to inflict—"</p>
<p>"Patrick."</p>
<p>"Sorry, to <em>induce</em> the Christmas joy that, as declared by The Kringle, is present in—in—" Here, he took a breath. Just say it, Andy's eyes seemed to say as his horns tilted encouragingly. Patrick took another breath. "<em>Present. In. All. Humans</em>." He tasted ashes on his tongue and though Andy didn't deserve it, the Krampus bore the full brunt of the glare Patrick couldn't keep from showing.</p>
<p>Andy's horns flared briefly, burning a reddish-orange before frosting over with a faint crackle. "See, that wasn't so hard."</p>
<p>"Andy—" Patrick began.</p>
<p>The Krampus lifted his finger. "Don't you want a happy ending for the job?"</p>
<p>"Of course I do!" Patrick wanted happy endings for all his assignments. "I've never <em>not</em> wanted anything but the happiest of endings for them! I even wanted to do a good job with sharp corners in the gulag." (Sharp corners were a treat for good-behavior privileges—the daily penal toil at the Giftwrap gulag is served wrapping oddly-shaped gifts like stand mixers and hula hoops and the ever-popular suburban gag gifts of bowling balls inside Panettone boxes. <em>Hilarious</em>).</p>
<p>"Making a ruckus again will land you in a worse place than Gift Wrapping," Andy said. "You need to get in, get the job done, and get the fuck back out." He closed his eyes and rose, mindful of the ceiling fan as he made his way over to the window. With one goat-leg out on the fire escape, he caught a horn on the sash and Patrick had to help maneuver it out the window. "Just—try. Try to believe instead of poking at the same questions. Christmas is about believing."</p>
<p>Andy made hoof prints on the fire escape's frost-covered steel. As Patrick pushed the window back down, he leaned his head against it, his breath fogging the glass as the Krampus-prints faded away. "The best part of believe is the lie."</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Did I make Andy into a Christmas demon? Yes I did. Did I give Soul Punk Devil!Patrick a little shout-out? Yes I did. Would I do it again? Yes I would.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Someday I'll appreciate in value</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Patrick really should not be left unsupervised.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Sorry this one's a little late, I had to wrestle it into submission.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Pete was still in the shower when the house phone rang. Patrick ignored it until it stopped, but five minutes later, as he was pouring coffee into two mugs and doing whippets with the whipped cream canister, the phone rang again. He almost shoved the nozzle so far up that he could have hit brain matter, dropped the canister, and fumbled for the phone. "Ah—House of Wentz, how may I help you?"</p>
<p>"Peter? Is that you?" An older woman's voice came down from the other end of the line. "Is this some new idea of yours? Honestly, you'd think you'd tell your own mother—"</p>
<p>Patrick cleared his throat. "Uh, sorry, Mrs. Wentz. Pete's in the shower. This is Pete's, um, friend, Patrick."</p>
<p>"Oh?" The tone turned curious. "Do I know 'um, friend, Patrick?'"</p>
<p>"We...have not met?" Patrick thought fast. "I came over to help Pete get some Christmas spirit." There, he didn't even have to lie. Even if the Christmas spirit was currently semi at-attention at thinking about Pete in the shower.</p>
<p>"Well, that's nice to hear. Has he opened the box yet? I bet he hasn't."</p>
<p>Patrick glanced over the breakfast bar into the living room. "He has not. But don't you worry, I'll set him straight. I'm very good at the Christmas spirit thing. It's my job."</p>
<p>"I'm glad to hear it. And I'm glad he's got a friend around. Everyone seems to go their separate ways around this time of year and he can get so sad—I keep telling him he should come down to his sister's with us, but—well, anyway, I won't bore you with his embarrassing secrets. Just tell him his mother called, will you?"</p>
<p>"Of course, Mrs. Wentz. You have a lovely day." Patrick hung up and squinted at the unopened box in the living room, not really seeing it. Something Pete's mom had said was kind of sticking to him and Patrick wasn't sure he wanted to poke that polar bear. <em>He can get so sad</em>, she'd said.</p>
<p>Whatever. Patrick didn't do sad. The Pole didn't do sad.</p>
<p>"Come on," Patrick said when Pete wandered out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his hips. "It's time for more Christmas fun! Today we're going to Wilmette Wonderland to pet the reindeer. And if you're good, I'll tell you the real story behind why the ones on the Sleigh can fly, and what part of Rudolph really glows in the dark." Just for good measure, he snaked a less-than-warm hand under Pete's towel, enjoying the feel of the warm, damp skin of Pete's inner thigh, and the hiss of his breath as he danced away.</p>
<p>"Dick! Your hands are freezing!" Pete chuckled. He whipped off the towel and snapped it at Patrick.</p>
<p>Patrick hadn't finished feeling the well-placed sting of the towel corner whipping against one point of the round swell of his tush before Pete was running down the hall towards the bedroom, naked and grinning.</p>
<p>Patrick darted after him and tackled him into the bedclothes. Half an hour later—oh who the fuck were they kidding, it was fifteen minutes, tops. Patrick's cold hands and hot mouth made Pete blush and mumble something about temperature play being an undiscovered kink he'd have to explore.</p>
<p>Patrick rolled over, wiped his mouth and shoved down his pants, and asked if Pete would like some snow-balls to the face. He had clearly underestimated Pete's creativity because he hadn't realized just how much he liked having his balls sucked when the one doing the sucking knew how to suck balls.</p>
<p>Twenty minutes later, Patrick was still lying on the bed while Pete finished buttoning up his shirt and slipped his red tie around his neck. "So...Wilmette Wonderland?"</p>
<p>"Yes on the Wilmette Wonderland," he said, slipping his feet into his dress shoes. "But no on petting the reindeer."</p>
<p>Patrick frowned. "Pete, I'm running out of days to teach you the magic of Christmas."</p>
<p>Pete snorted, curving his lips up in a smile that didn't reach his eyes. "The magic of Christmas would be if I actually sold a Gutter-Guard instead of just collecting fake names and addresses and real phone numbers that nobody answers." Pete took the coffee Patrick handed to him without even thinking about it.</p>
<p>He scooted past Patrick to the fridge and pulled out the eggs, then set the pan on the stove to heat, and scrambled four of them before dumping them into the pan. Patrick scooted around him and pulled two pieces of bread from the bag and slid them into the toaster on the opposite counter.</p>
<p>"Maybe if you decorated, you'd feel more Christmassy." Patrick didn't even believe himself in that tone.</p>
<p>"Maybe if you sucked my dick, I'd sing 'O Come All Ye Faithful' instead. Would that work?"</p>
<p>Patrick's lips twisted. "Not unless you hear bells. Gotta hear the bells, remember?"</p>
<p>Pete moved eggs around in the pan. "What happens if I don't hear the bells?"</p>
<p>Patrick burnt his fingers on the toast. "Ow! Fuck! BitchTitsCockSuckerLickMyAsscrack!"</p>
<p>Pete turned around and snorted laughter. "Dude, I changed my mind. No more sucking my dick with that mouth until you clean it up."</p>
<p>Patrick picked up the toast off the counter with the butter knife and flipped it onto a plate. Over the shrick-shrick-shrick of applying butter to toast. "You're so into my dirty mouth."</p>
<p>"You kiss your mother with that thing?" Pete spun in counterpoint as Patrick turned to get the orange juice out of the fridge. In the little galley kitchen, they moved around each other as easily as habits.</p>
<p>"I talked to yours with it."</p>
<p>"Ha ha."</p>
<p>"No, for real." Patrick poured the orange juice into two shot glasses. "She called. Wants you to call her back."</p>
<p>Pete scooped eggs onto the plates next to the toast. "So I did hear ringing in the shower."</p>
<p>"Doesn't count." Patrick set forks on the counter. They moved in tandem again, spinning around each other so Pete could put the pan in the sink and so Patrick could scoot around to the breakfast bar. "You gotta hear the Christmas bells."</p>
<p>Pete set the plates on the breakfast bar. "And what do they sound like?" His hip brushed against Patrick's as he hopped up on the stool next to him. Two coffees (one "doctored," one not), two plates of eggs and toast.</p>
<p>Patrick took a swallow of coffee (doctored) before answering. "They—you can't—it's hard to describe. What does belief sound like? Do they ring just off the key of reason? Is merriment clear and tonal, or deep and warm?"</p>
<p>Pete propped his head on one hand while he pushed eggs around with the other. "Maybe it sounds like hope."</p>
<p>Patrick shrugged. "I dunno." The details of previous assignments were necessarily foggy. He remembered joyous smiles, sighs of giddy relief, laughter, but nothing about bells. <em>Except for the last time when they were sirens and not bells</em>—he shoved the thought away. "I've never actually heard them. Kinda hard to hear much of anything over the din of the toy factory and all the ambient magic in the air at the Pole. Plus—the reindeer aren't exactly quiet beasts." He finished his eggs and toast and knocked back the orange juice. "Guess I'll have to figure out how to show you Christmas magic some other way at a Christmas festival."</p>
<p>"If 'Christmas magic' is your dick again, maybe not right in the main aisle?" Pete grinned. "But seriously—you don't have to hang around while I hustle people's addresses out of them in exchange for winning a stepladder. You can go...do...elf things." He waved his hand.</p>
<p>Patrick stuck one leg out. "I can 'do elf things' within twenty-five feet of you." He collected the plates and cups and set them in the sink as Pete finished his last few sips of coffee. "When we're done there, we should decorate the place tonight. I'll even let you watch 'Shadowed By My Postman—At Christmas!' or whatever schmaltz is on while we do it."</p>
<p>Pete's eyes widened. "You mean there's a 'Shadowed By My Postman' Christmas sequel?"</p>
<p>Patrick rolled his eyes. "I was joking!" He threw a dirty napkin at Pete as the latter skipped down the hall, giggling. "I didn't think it was real!"</p>
<p>"Too late!" Pete's voice came muffled from the spare room.</p>
<p>While Pete was doing...whatever it was that he did to get ready to try and sell Gutter Guards to an uncaring universe, Patrick tidied up in the kitchen. As he washed the dishes, he started humming 'O Holy Night.'</p>
<p>He told himself it was because he just wanted to fill the silence and make the chore go faster. But when he lifted his head in mid-chorus, he found Pete gaping at him, frozen in the space between the hallway and the living room.</p>
<p>Because Patrick could never let a song go unfinished, he let the last notes of 'o night divine' fade away into the sudden silence before saying, "What?" as he dried his hands on the grotty hand towel. hanging over the cabinet door.</p>
<p>Pete blinked. "I—do—do all elves have pipes like that?"</p>
<p>A hot blush—nowhere to be found when the filthiest innuendos came out of his mouth—crawled up Patrick's neck. "What? It's just—" He frowned. "I like the part where I get to sing, 'fall on your knees,' okay?"</p>
<p>Pete kept looking at him like he was some sort of amazing magical thing that just landed in his lap (okay, aside from the 'magical' part which was really just circumstances of birth and a certain affinity for the ambient as-yet-scientifically-measured laws of space-time). Patrick squirmed under the soft, warm-bourbon expression, already subconsciously fearing its implications. And ignoring the sudden urge to preen with an internal sunshine-y spark of his own.</p>
<p>"Don't you have a ladder to give away?" He jammed his Bingo-cum-Santa hat down over his shaggy hair.</p>
<p>**</p>
<p>Pete's booth was set up down a side avenue next to two old ladies selling bedazzled sweatshirts with light-up elements in a pop-up with a plastic banner that said "Santa's Sweat Shop" which was either tacky as hell or a bitingly subtle commentary on the commercial nature of the season. Beneath it, in smaller lettering, the sign read, "Home of Santa's Dirty Laundry!"</p>
<p>Thank fuck there were no creepy lifelike puppets this time around—that couple was set up in another side-aisle and when Pete pointed them out to Patrick, complete with biker Santa and the Krampus, instead of laughing as he'd expected, Patrick went pale and he grabbed Pete's elbow and did an about-face right back out of the aisle. "What," Pete asked. "Did that hit a little too close to home?"</p>
<p>"You have no idea," Patrick muttered.</p>
<p>Patrick hung around for the first half-hour, helping him hang the banner and set up the table. He unfolded the ladder to its A-frame, then climbed it and straddled the top point of the rungs. "Yee-haw!"</p>
<p>Pete just rolled his eyes. "Get down from there. It looks like you're humping the thing."</p>
<p>"I'm an elf and I'm short, even for an elf. I find things that are taller than me irresistible." He flexed his hips again. "This cowboy's ridin' this thing all the way to the Ram Ranch!"</p>
<p>Pete snorted a braying laugh. "Keep riding that ladder and you'll never get a shot at my ass." He shooed Patrick off to 'go do elf things, preferably if they take you past the Amish girls who make the hot pretzels and bring me back one, too.'</p>
<p>The crowds were at their thickest after the first hour, so while things were slow, he stepped away from the booth to give the two sweatshirt ladies a hand with some of their merch.</p>
<p>"You're very kind for helping out," the blue-haired one said.</p>
<p>Pete shrugged. "It kind of reminds me of when I was in a punk band. We had to sell our own merch at shows, and there was nobody else around to help out or do it for us."</p>
<p>"Ooh, so I bet my hair makes you feel right at home." She patted her curls. "We both felt like we needed some bright spots and what better place to start than with the top of your own head!"</p>
<p>Pete smiled. "Maybe one day I can get away with having pink hair. I don't know if you'd be into our sound. We mostly just played with instruments and made a lot of noise. At least, that's what the entertainment section said about our last live show. I'm Pete, by the way. If you need any more help, just say the word."</p>
<p>Her eyes twinkled up at him. "I'm Judy, and Think-Pink over there is Doreen." Then she winked. "We met at a Stooges show in Detroit." She left him goggling as her first customer drifted over to the display rack.</p>
<p>Pete returned to his own booth, chuckling to himself. He had a hard time picturing the two soft and round senior citizens as young women thrashing around at a punk show over fifty years ago—hell, he had a hard time reckoning with the idea that punk itself was old enough to get the discount breakfast at Denny's. "Strange how people's lives take weird turns," he said to himself as a middle-aged couple passed.</p>
<p>Then he raised his voice. "One day, you're just enjoying life, and the next, your ceiling's sprung a leak and you've got thirty grand in damage because of a few leaves clogging your gutters." And he got down to the hustle.</p>
<p>Some days it came easy, and others, he really felt like an Invisible Man who couldn't stop looking into mirrors and hoping somebody would see him. Early on, people were in generous moods and Christmas-y spirit. Even sympathetic towards the poor sap who had to hustle something as un-fun as gutter protection when there were spangly sweatshirts next door and hand-crafted toys to tempt hipsters into thinking they were 'child-development' experts because they gave their kid something wooden to play with and hadn't yet caught on that splinters did not equal character growth.</p>
<p>Pete couldn't fault Patrick for wandering off, but when he saw Patrick ducking into the old ladies' booth instead of coming back bearing pretzels, he felt just a little betrayed.</p>
<p>As the afternoon wore on, the kids were more fidgety, the air was getting colder, and he could actually hear the poor old reindeer and goats over at the petting zoo braying their own discontent. People wanted to see their goddamn Santa parade, sit on the old fucker's lap, get their pictures, and get gone. And he was getting tired of being looked through.</p>
<p>A young couple with three kids wandered past and the dad failed to avoid eye contact. Pete put his best smile on and beckoned. "Sir? You look like a man who needs a stepladder!"</p>
<p>The man frowned. "Look, pal, I don't think you have any room to call anybody short—"</p>
<p>Fuck. Pete switched gears. "As a gift for a loved one with home improvement in mind, of course! Why not take a chance at winning a six-foot utility ladder, just a way for us folks at your neighborhood Gutter Guard to say Happy Holidays." He ended his speech with a wide, expectant smile to dead silence.</p>
<p>Out of the corner of his eye, he spied Patrick coming out of the Santa's Sweat Shop booth with a sweatshirt on.</p>
<p>"Ahem. Happy...<em>holidays?</em>" The wife—a trim brunette with a powder blue overcoat that was far too stylish to fit in outside Michigan avenue—asked the question carefully, a small smile on her face and ice in her voice.</p>
<p>"Yeah," Pete said as he tracked Patrick out of the corner of his eye. Patrick slipped into the middle of the lane, loitering at a distance from the family. "So do you want—"</p>
<p>Behind them, Patrick smoothed down the front of the sweatshirt and oh—oh no.</p>
<p>"Jesus didn't die for your sins so you could forget His birthday," the woman snapped.</p>
<p>Pete brought his attention back to her. Fuck. Another one. He pasted the blandest expression on his face and stepped back. "I'll just—"</p>
<p>"You'll just hand me that pen," the husband said and held out his hand.</p>
<p>Double fuck. Instead of slinking back behind the table while the angry mother stomped off, Pete had to stay and be attentive while the dad filled out the entry slip with the slowest penmanship this side of Lake Michigan and his wife fumed.</p>
<p>He glanced behind the family to where Patrick sauntered back and forth, pretending to browse. The brand-new white sweatshirt he wore was air-brushed with two side-by-side, buff-colored cartoon reindeer heads with round, plump, exaggerated snouts. <em>Hey, those almost look like—</em></p>
<p>"Happy Holidays!" Judy and Doreen sang out in unison as they sent off another happy sweatshirt customer.</p>
<p>His wife glanced at the two older women and then huffed again. "Political correctness is ruining this country," she snapped, expecting to be listened to. "Instead of proper respect, everybody wants their own set of pronouns and special treatment with their perverted lifestyles shoved in our faces!"</p>
<p>Pete pressed his lips together, his face a mask of neutrality. He cleared his throat. "Ma'am—"</p>
<p>"Foul language is 'protected' but we're not allowed to say 'God' in our schools! Meanwhile, those who work hard and believe right—"</p>
<p>Pete drew a breath, ready to throw his job out the window, only hesitating because Spencer had a family to support and Gutter Guard was their biggest account. But he caught movement behind her instead.</p>
<p>Behind her, Patrick made a show of stretching and straightening his new sweatshirt, puffing out his chest. The reindeer had antlers that stuck up off his shoulders like stuffed-felt tumors but their exaggerated, round muzzles drooped down on his chest, ending in two pom-pom noses with LED lights that flashed and changed colors. Right at nipple level. Patrick's grin grew wider as he lifted his cupped hands to the reindeer snouts and squeezed.</p>
<p>Pete pressed his lips together again, this time to hold in a snicker. The woman in front of him grew more smug. Her eyes dared him to interrupt. <em>Fuckity</em> fuck. There were always a few who knew they had a captive audience due to Customer Service expectations and this one clearly had an ax to grind. Pete tried—he really did try—but his eyes glazed over and wandered back to Patrick who—thank God—had stopped squeezing his reindeer-snout "breasts."</p>
<p>Pete's relief was short-lived, however, as Patrick licked his plump lower lip, then brought his hands up to his face. He licked two fingers of one hand, then the other. He dropped them to the fuzzball noses and rubbed them in tiny little circles, all while tipping his head back and gazing, heavy-lidded, at Pete with the evilest grin on his face.</p>
<p>Pete lost it. He sputtered out laughing and doubled over.</p>
<p>"Hey!" The woman snapped. The oldest kid of their pack began to snicker and Pete saw that the kid spotted Patrick's antics. The mother whirled around and gasped. "Oh My Fucking God!"</p>
<p>She grabbed her children and nudged her husband. "Blake! Blake! We're leaving this instant!" Meanwhile, ol' Blake was still trying to remember his zip code.</p>
<p>The youngest child tugged on his father's coat. "Daddy, Mommy said the baddest word!"</p>
<p>The mother grabbed her middle child who pointed at what his older brother had seen. "Mommy those look like mummums with numnies sticking—"</p>
<p>"You hush!" The mother screeched. "Blake!"</p>
<p>Patrick continued to rub his reindeer-nose light-up fuzzy nipples, making the porniest "oooh" faces Pete had ever seen, making his sweatshirt-tits bounce as he gyrated his hips. <em>Jesus Christ, I'm gonna go straight to hell</em>, Pete thought. <em>But that little fucker is coming with me</em>.</p>
<p>The dad was still struggling with the entry form. Pete caught his breath long enough to say, "Dude, just put a phone number down. I might just give you that ladder if you gotta live with that."</p>
<p>The woman was already dragging Blake away by the scruff of his coat.</p>
<p>The two old ladies from the sweatshirt booth next to him popped out from under their awning.</p>
<p>"Such language," Judy said as the woman struggled to collect her oldest who was still watching Patrick.</p>
<p>"Hey mom, can I get a sweatshirt—"</p>
<p>"Carlton! Don't start your mother—"</p>
<p>The pink-haired lady—Doreen—put an arm around her partner's shoulder. "Honestly. Parenting today is so lackadaisical. Why, in my day, children knew the proper terms for breasts and nipples and penises and vaginas and clitorises!"</p>
<p>"I think it's 'clitori' if it's more than one. Greek and Latin word roots, you know." Her blue-haired companion interjected.</p>
<p>"Can you imagine having more than one of those, Judy?"</p>
<p>"Not until after my heart pills, Doreen."</p>
<p>Pete had lost it entirely by now. He'd fallen to one knee and was gasping for breath between howls of laughter. "Ohmygod—I'm gonna—get thrown out—"</p>
<p>Judy trundled over and patted his back soothingly. "That's it, sweetie. Breathe through it, like a first-time bottom." Which started Pete all over again, this time his laughter braying up and down the entire aisle.</p>
<p>He spent the remaining hours smiling broadly, wishing people happy holidays and season's greetings, getting told off for not saying "Merry Christmas," and generally not getting many sign-ups for his ladder, but giggling randomly every time he thought of Patrick's sweatshirt, or Judy's subtle double entendres.</p>
<p>Doreen sent Patrick off for pretzels for everyone. "It's getting late, they'll discount what's left so they can pack up early. Off you go, Tits McGee."</p>
<p>"Pete? Pete Wentz?"</p>
<p>Someone actually calling his name? <em>Oh God, please don't let it be somebody I knew in high school</em>.</p>
<p>But the name was coming from underneath a glorious head of shaggy curls and from a dude wearing a faded black hoodie underneath a denim jacket covered in patches from all the gods in Pete's personal pantheon—Metallica, Guns'n'Roses, Pantera...</p>
<p>"Joe Troh! My man, how you doing?" Pete took the outstretched hand and leaned into the bro-hug, getting a mouthful of Joe's shoulder-length curls and a lungful of herby, smoky air.</p>
<p>"Ehh, hangin' in there." At Pete's shoulder-pat, Joe winced.</p>
<p>"Dude, you okay?" Pete looked more closely and saw the green and yellow of a faded bruise on the side of his jaw, mostly covered by his hair.</p>
<p>Joe shrugged and rubbed his jaw. "Just a scuffle a few nights ago. I subbed in for one of the hardcore bands and somebody wouldn't stop running their mouth about homos so, y'know."</p>
<p>"My hero?" He grinned at Joe, keeping his lips stretched carefully wide, ready to be sincere or sardonic, as the case called for it.</p>
<p>"I did what any righteous punk would do and I kissed the fucker full on the mouth." Joe's grin showed a few more teeth than it maybe warranted.</p>
<p>Pete's smile went full-on genuine for a flash before it faded. "Guess it's not so bad that I'm not getting to as many shows as I used to." Still, he couldn't help feeling a little disappointed. "Whatever happened to the scene where the outsiders could go? The overcast kids and the underdogs who were too school for cool?"</p>
<p>Joe shook his head. "I dunno, man. I feel like the hardcore isn't what it used to be. It's so serious now. Nobody just has fun. It's like everybody wants to have a musical fight on stage and I just wanna play my guitar, y'know?"</p>
<p>"Yeah." Pete glanced around. He didn't hear any panicked elf-yelps, so Patrick was presumably still within twenty-five yards or whatever. The sun was starting to thin out, heading towards the red end of the spectrum and that late-afternoon, suddenly-cold feeling lurked in the bluing shadows made by the booths. People were starting to head out to the parade route for Santa to make his way via a classic convertible from the car dealership and Pete's fishbowl was thin on the contest entries.</p>
<p>A guy shuffled past in plaid flannel and Pete made a half-hearted attempt. "Sir? Interested in winning a six-foot utility ladder, compliments of Gutter Guard?"</p>
<p>The guy, graying hair peeking out from under a watch cap, sneered at him. "Do I look like somebody who owns a house?" he growled.</p>
<p>"The paths to homeownership are many and varied and available to those from all walks of life, sir," Joe called out as the guy shouldered past.</p>
<p>One hand came up with a single digit extended as the guy passed.</p>
<p>"You go ahead and have a Merry Christmas," Joe sang out sardonically.</p>
<p>Pete gave a quiet snort and covered his mouth with his hand.</p>
<p>Joe tilted his head. "Pete?" He glanced over Pete's shoulder at the booth behind him. "What are you doing, dude?" The question was asked in a low, serious tone, confidential and confused.</p>
<p>"Working," he said, knowing full well that wasn't the answer. "Gotta pay the bills, you know?"</p>
<p>"This ain't you, though." Joe made a motion to the booth and the display box.</p>
<p>"It's 7.25 an hour plus fifty cents for each good entry slip and if one of my entries makes a purchase, I get five percent commission."</p>
<p>Joe's eyebrows vanished upward into his curls. "And has that ever happened?"</p>
<p>Pete sighed. "Don't knock the hustle."</p>
<p>Joe picked up a brochure. "<em>This</em> is what you're hustling, though?" He pointed at the terrible clip art. "Where's the hand-lettered flyer? The one-sentence manifesto, the part where this changes the world?"</p>
<p>Pete felt his insides crumple. "It left the scene for a real job because pizza doesn't pay the rent." He gestured to the brochure. "Nobody read those, and nobody reads these, either, but I get paid for handing these ones out."</p>
<p>"I read 'em," Joe said quietly. "When a snot-nosed kid tried to tell you not to quit your day job, you told me to get a day job in music."</p>
<p>Pete couldn't remember having said that, but it sounded like the kind of bullshit he'd say to somebody after the set, still high and arrogant from screaming his brain-rot into the microphone and jumping into the crowd so he felt enough hands on him to remind him he was still there. "It's—I say a lot of stupid things, Joe. You shouldn't take life advice from a Gutter Guard guy freezing his nuts off at the Wilmette Wonderland festival without even a hot pretzel in his hand."</p>
<p>"Dude, it was brilliant advice! I don't have to quit music if <em>music</em> is the day job." Joe waved a brochure in his face. "This...Gutter Guard guy isn't you." Joe shook his head.</p>
<p>Pete gestured to the booth behind him. "What do you want me to say?"</p>
<p>Joe shoved an agitated hand through his curls, making them stand up and crackle with static electricity. "I want you to say, 'Hey, Trohman, I have this great idea for a new band, let's turn this scene upside down,' and then tell me when to show up with my Strat."</p>
<p>Tight bands twisted around Pete's ribs. "I—" He sucked wind through a clogged throat. "I tried." The beaten-down dry-grass aisle where the booths were set up suddenly filled with the ghosts of hand-lettered flyers, trod into the dirt by indifferent boots and a rushing internal cadence.</p>
<p>"You're such a strange shape, right now, trying to fit into this shit." Joe scuffed the dry grass with his toe. "You wouldn't have to do that with music."</p>
<p>Pete ducked his head. "You ever think about maybe starting something for real?" He mumbled the question.</p>
<p>"Me?" Joe pointed at himself. "I'm nobody. You're Pete fuckin' Wentz, man."</p>
<p>"I'm the Gutter Guard loser who can't give away a ladder." The names were different, the art was by turns awful and sometimes gross, but the message was the same with every staple Pete pounded into a telephone pole, every piece of duct tape that nearly ripped off his skin before sticking the paper on the window glass. <em>Pay attention to me, I have something important to say</em>.</p>
<p>Pete suddenly wanted to shuck his coat and run away from the maze of small-time commercialism. He wanted to feel that Christmas-morning feeling of anticipation that came from the backrooms of bars just as the soundcheck was wrapping up. He wanted the adrenaline rush like the one he shared with Patrick the other day, running from the asshole at the skating rink after stirring up trouble.</p>
<p>He grabbed Joe's arm and reached behind him for the Sharpie, locating it by feel.</p>
<p>"Wha—" Joe stumbled forward. Pete used the momentum to bite the cap off the Sharpie and shove Joe's hoodie sleeve up to his elbow.</p>
<p>He scratched down his cell phone number along the inside of Joe's wrist, then spat the cap out into his hand. He met Joe's clear blue eyes. "I'll try again if you will."</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>May we all encounter Judys and Doreens in our travels.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. Perfect boys with their perfect lives</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Domesticity at its finest</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Well, after the embarrassment of the last chapter, I thought it was time to stick close to home and laugh while Patrick tries to get into the holiday spirit when he'd rather get into Pete's pants.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Patrick threw another glance over at the fake tree they had just finished assembling—against Patrick's better judgment.</p>
<p>Pete brought over the rest of what he called his 'X-Box.' "Because it has <em>Ecks</em>-mas stuff in it, see?" he said when Patrick raised a skeptical eyebrow.</p>
<p>Patrick whacked him upside the head with a plastic tree branch and complained that a fake tree wasn't really the spirit of Christmas. "I'm supposed to take you out to the tree farm or the tree stand, so you can smell the fresh scent of pine and snow and—"</p>
<p>"I froze my nuts off for most of the day yesterday standing out in the 'fresh air and scent of snow' and it sucked. I'm staying in today."</p>
<p>"But you won't get a chance to meet a hunky tree lumberjack," Patrick shot back.</p>
<p>Pete retaliated by tossing him a ratty old red and black plaid shirt that looked like it'd been to a Soundgarden concert before they got huge. "Here you go, lumberjack-off. If you grow a beard with those sideburns, maybe I'll let you rub it between my cheeks."</p>
<p>"Deal." Patrick tossed away his jerkin, which was starting to smell like Pete's floor (and old jizz, too, because he was almost sure he'd used it to mop up at some point, and even the magic of Christmas could only do so much) and shrugged into the plaid, which smelled like Pete's drawers (the ones in his dresser, but Patrick wouldn't have minded ball-sweat, either, if it was first-day ball-sweat). "But I get to choose which set."</p>
<p>So they spent the morning listening to sleet hit the windows, listening to The Misfits and Pete's collection of 80's movie soundtracks, and maybe Pete fell a little bit in love when Patrick started singing along to "Everybody Wants to Rule the World." And maybe he fell a little more in love when Patrick started singing "Let's Go Crazy" and declared that Purple Rain was the best movie of that decade (Pete might disagree on principle, since his first loyalty had to be John Hughes and Chicagoland, rather than Albert Magnoli and Minneapolis).</p>
<p>He did <em>not</em> fall in love because of Patrick's fake tree assembly skills. The tree stood in the corner between Pete's desk and the wall, propped up by two of Pete's record crates. There were extra wingnuts in a sandwich baggie on the desk and bare spots in the branches, and the two pieces of trunk had a distinct elbow-bend in the little sleeve that was supposed to hold them together and keep them straight. There was probably way too much electrical tape wound around the wires connecting the string of fairy lights that lay in a heap next to the tree, having been thrown down by a frustrated Patrick with a, "Fuck this shit, it's bullshit!"</p>
<p>Pete cocked his head. "Dude?"</p>
<p>Patrick rolled his eyes. "It's the fuckin' blowback."</p>
<p>Pete's eyes lit up. "Is that some elfin sex trick? Hey, you're <em>my</em> elfin sex Trick!"</p>
<p>Patrick pantsed him for that, which led to the kind of blowback he preferred, but when they came up for air, Patrick got frustrated all over again, just looking at the stupid lights.</p>
<p>"Easy, dude. What's blowback?"</p>
<p>Patrick huffed. "Magic generates a distortion field. Sometimes, stuff reacts. Christmas lights are notorious for it. That's why, no matter how carefully you pack them away, Christmas lights will always come out in a snarly, knotted <em>clusterfuck</em>."</p>
<p>"Hey, easy." Pete captured his wrists.</p>
<p>"I need a drink," Patrick muttered.</p>
<p>"I have just the thing." Pete disappeared into the kitchen. </p>
<p>Patrick flounced into a chair at the table. He pulled out his little notebook and began logging a formal protest, citing Pete's insistence on a fake tree when Pete sat two mugs of cocoa on the dining room table, then brought over the 'X-box' (Patrick would never forgive him for that).</p>
<p>Pete sorted through the box, then plunked down a large bag of candy canes and craft paraphernalia. "Okay. So. Let's do a Christmas craft, then."</p>
<p>"A Christmas craft."</p>
<p>He pulled the candy canes out of the box and divided them between Patrick and himself. He put half the little fuzzy pipe cleaners on top of Patrick's pile of candy canes, and the other half next to his own then opened a Ziploc bag of googly eyes and tiny red puffballs and set it between them with the two little glue bottles.</p>
<p>Patrick sat down across from him and ran his hands through the craft supplies. "Who made you do this?"</p>
<p>"Nobody," Pete said. "My mom was a teacher. When she retired she still had some of her classroom stuff. She gave some of them to me when I moved out so I'd have something to do with my hands in the cold and lonely winter nights."</p>
<p>"I can think of plenty to do with your hands on cold and lonely winter nights. None of them involve googly eyes." Patrick unscrewed the cap of the little airplane-bottle of Bailey's Irish Creme. He was about to tip it into his mug of cocoa when he lifted his head and caught Pete looking at him. "What?"</p>
<p>Pete had built enough observational data to say something, so he did. "I just noticed—you go for the booze when we're doing something Christmas-related."</p>
<p>"My whole existence is Christmas-related. I go for the booze when I feel like it." But Patrick put the bottle down, capping it haphazardly.</p>
<p>Pete ducked his head and picked up a candy cane to hide his smile. He twisted the brown pipe cleaner around the hook of the candy cane until it made two large "horns," then bent the horns into more points until they looked like a lumpy version of a set of antlers. He picked up the bottle of glue and squeezed two careful dabs onto the back of a set of googly eyes, and one blob onto the red puffball. "It takes some careful fingering to get the eyes and the nose to look just right."</p>
<p>"Careful fingering, huh?" Patrick glanced up. "You any good at that?"</p>
<p>"I play the bass," Pete retorted. "I can strum to a beat."</p>
<p>Patrick's lips—including that sinful lower one—quirked up. "I was a drummer a long time ago. Used to march in the North Pole Drum and Bugle Corps."</p>
<p>Pete grinned. "Aww, you were a band geek!" He nudged Patrick's shoulder. "Did you have a uniform with brass buttons? Wear a giant Q-tip hat?"</p>
<p>"Yes." Patrick glanced up again, meeting Pete's eyes directly. "We called ourselves the Nutcrackers, because we did." His grin turned evil.</p>
<p>Pete hooted in laughter until he realized Patrick was serious. "You mean—the actual nutcrackers? The soldiers...with the jaws..."</p>
<p>Patrick lunged forward and made chompy-face, then burst into giggles when Pete skittered right out of his chair and onto his ass on the floor. So Pete retaliated by locking onto his ankle and yanking until Patrick followed him down. They scuffled for a minute—for an elf, Patrick was surprisingly strong, but a lucky break gave Pete the upper hand and put Patrick in a headlock just long enough for Pete to lick his ear.</p>
<p>"Aaugh! Dude!" Patrick rolled away, leaving Pete a laughing heap in the middle of the floor. He wiped his ear, then wiped it again. "Dude, gross." His cheeks were pink and his eyes glimmered and Pete maybe fell a little more in love because right then, Patrick really did look like something magic.</p>
<p>"Do you miss it?" He asked suddenly. "Do you have family up there?"</p>
<p>Patrick finished wiping his ear and flopped back into the chair. "We don't have...er, families like you have families." He glanced over at Pete. "We come from magic, and magic needs a purpose. When that purpose is fulfilled..." Patrick looked down, suddenly very interested in pipe cleaners. "Well, magic returns to itself. Kind of like the T-1000 in Terminator 2."</p>
<p>"Wait, you're telling me you're, like, some dude's limb?" Pete's eyes widened.</p>
<p>Patrick snorted. "And you didn't say 'left buttcheek?' Pete, I'm disappointed."</p>
<p>Pete had been slurping hot cocoa through the whipped cream and nearly spewed it back out.</p>
<p>The elf grinned. "Naww. It's just we're kind of...more like..." he cocked his head. "A hive mind. A swarm of bees. We do our thing out here, but then it's back to the hive. Buzz buzz buzz."</p>
<p>Pete could be reading too much into it, but he thought he detected a little sadness. How many other poor schmucks had Patrick been 'assigned' to? Did he get close to them? Sing Prince songs? Did he give any of <em>them</em> blowjobs? Patrick said he had to hear bells before Patrick was called back home.</p>
<p><em>What if I don't want to hear bells?</em> Patrick might have started out a strange, yet spankable, ass in his apartment, but Pete hadn't laughed so hard or so long in what felt like forever. Hadn't felt so <em>seen</em>.</p>
<p>He stole glances at the elf while he twisted pipe-cleaner antlers around candy-cane reindeer. Patrick had piled his craft supplies and hunched over them like a grumpy, pink-cheeked little Gollum over His Precious. His tongue stuck out of the side of his mouth and a little frown line appeared between his eyebrows. When he was finally finished, he held up the candy cane. "And here we are. Much more true-to-life."</p>
<p>Pete blinked. Patrick's candy cane had a mass of twisted pipe-cleaner antlers not unlike his own, but there, the similarities ended. Multiple puffballs were glued to the "nose" area in a tumorous cluster and the googly eyes—a whole dozen of them—peered out from between the puffballs like some grotesque eldritch horror.</p>
<p>"Please tell me that's not really true-to-life. I already have nightmares, I don't need more fuel."</p>
<p>"I told you, things at the Pole work differently than what you believe. We have a very good PR department." While Pete set his reindeer and Patrick's...nightmare-thing...aside until the glue dried, Patrick pulled the box back up to the table. "Let's see what else is in here that'll embarrass you."</p>
<p>Patrick pulled out a construction paper stocking with cotton balls glued to the top and a tiny cutout in the middle. In the cutout, a picture of a little boy with curly hair and big teeth and huge, liquid-dark eyes grinned up from one of those cloudy blue backdrops common to elementary school class pictures and department store "portrait studios" staffed by exhausted photographers equipped with large cameras and even larger bins of squeaky toys to Make the Baby Smile. The glitter glue had faded and worn off in most of the spots, but the residue was left intact and spelled P-E-T-E.</p>
<p>"I'm always afraid to hang them on a tree," Pete said, stealing up behind him.</p>
<p>Next came a snowflake made out of a coffee filter, at the center of which was another portrait. The boy was older, the smile more controlled, the features at that awkward middle-school size.</p>
<p>"They don't match or look cool or even fit. And Stuck Santa will make his entire branch droop."</p>
<p>Pete lifted out a little fired-clay sculpture, heavy in his hand, that looked like a wobbly chimney with a pair of legs and a rear end, painted red and white with a pair of black boots at the end, coming out of the top.</p>
<p>"Stuck—oh!"</p>
<p>Pete flipped the clay ornament over to show the unglazed bottom. "P.W. '97 / Stuck Santa" was scraped crudely into the clay. Patrick turned it back over and grinned. "That's awesome," he said, even though the Santa was the typical red-suited jolly fat guy who was nothing at all like what sat in the sleigh at the dark of the year.</p>
<p>"They're just old crafts." Pete took the ornament from him and re-tied the ribbon. He pulled out another one—this one a manger made out of popsicle sticks. "Look—broken, too." Dried glue stuck out in ridges where missing popsicle sticks were supposed to make the left half of the roof.</p>
<p>A smaller ceramic tree-shaped frame featured a shot of three teens, teenage Pete part of a pyramid along with his brother and sister. On the back was the date and "Love Mom and Dad." Pete ran a finger over the top of the tree where the green-painted glaze gave way to the chalky off-white inner clay. "The star broke off this one." He set it back in the smaller box.</p>
<p>Patrick understood—perhaps more than he expected to. He pointed to the picture on the tree box, showing the tree with professionally decorated, color-coordinated ornaments in expert placement. "None of them really fit, do they?"</p>
<p>Pete shook his head and shrugged. "But I can't throw 'em away." He stepped back and raised a skeptical eyebrow in Patrick's direction. "Isn't this the part where you tell me that Christmas isn't about looking good? That it's really about family and togetherness and ornaments that mean something? That homemade is better than store-bought?"</p>
<p>Patrick searched his memories of the Pole outside the Giftwrap gulag and shrugged. "The official tree at the Pole is...functional." He looked down at Pete's hands as Pete closed the box on the younger versions of himself and his siblings and family memories and imperfections. "It's engineered to capture ambient Christmas cheer and distill it into elfin Christmas magic dust."</p>
<p>Pete glanced up at him. "That sounds more like Scrooge than Bob Cratchit."</p>
<p>Patrick shrugged again. "Modernization. Efficiency. The population explosion really forced Management to shift into high gear, I guess."</p>
<p>Pete set the box on the floor, then moved the little tree on top of it. "Ever think of seizing the means of production?" His lips twisted into a wry smile.</p>
<p>"It's a restricted area," Patrick replied. "You can't get in without a badge and a work order and a week-long occupational safety and health training certification."</p>
<p>"What about getting out? What happens to Christmas elves when they reach retirement age?"</p>
<p>Patrick cocked his head to the side. "You know, I have no idea. No one's old enough to retire. We only age during our season, which is why most of us look like children."</p>
<p>"Huh." Pete squinted at him for a long, silent moment. "And here I was, a little worried that I was robbing the cradle with you."</p>
<p>Patrick smirked. "Nope. One of the reasons I got such a light sentence was that I have Seniority." He made a face. "Takes me out of the running for Kringle, though. I'll never sit the Sleigh. Not that I ever wanted to," he added. He scowled at the tangled mess of tree lights and began to work the knots apart. Much more calmly. <em>Huh. Who knew?</em></p>
<p>"You're not serious." Pete gaped at him.</p>
<p>"It's an elected office. Which of course means that it's a popularity contest. You have to not get too attached to those awards committees." Patrick found himself wanting to talk, which was...problematic. But apparently, the craft glue was no good at sealing his big fat mouth shut. "Every Kringle picks an agenda to push and that's what Christmas becomes."</p>
<p>"Yeah? What's the current one pushing? Crass commercialism?"</p>
<p>Patrick's lip curled. The light string separated from a particularly stubborn knot with a spark. "Not overtly. The official PR is 'relentlessly joyful,' and they're not kidding when they say 'relentless.'" He handed Pete the string of lights and while Pete wound them around the little plastic tree, Patrick shoved the plug into the socket of the power strip. Maybe with a little more force than necessary. "It's 'Joy to the World' whether they want it or not," he said grimly.</p>
<p>"Well, that sounds like the Christmas everybody's selling." Pete shrugged as he finished twisting the lights around the branches. He flicked the switch and the string flickered to life. "Heyyy! They work!"</p>
<p>Patrick backed away from the tree carefully, just to make sure the thing wouldn't fall over. "Yeah, the problem is when people aren't buying. Guys like me have to step in. See, when people wish you a Merry Christmas or a Happy Holidays or whatever, they're <em>wishing</em>. Using—or trying to use—magic when they only have the little bit of magic that every human has."</p>
<p>Pete frowned. "Not that I mind you being here, but—"</p>
<p>"Remember when you invited me to shove my Christmas cheer up my ass?"</p>
<p>"I never! There are other things I'd like to shove up your ass."</p>
<p>Patrick waved a hand. "The sentiment was there. I wouldn't—didn't—blame you. Unfortunately, I wasn't allowed to just fuck off and leave you to whatever kind of Christmas you wanted." He scratched his chin, where a little ruddy dusting of stubble was just starting to sprout. "When the Pole wishes you a Merry Christmas, it's not a request."</p>
<p>Pete scowled at the tree and stepped back. "It needs something."</p>
<p>"Yeah, ornaments," Patrick retorted.</p>
<p>Pete raised one eyebrow in his direction. "So why me?" He asked. "I mean, the whole thing hardly seems fair. What if I don't want to have a merry Christmas or whatever?" He turned towards the window.</p>
<p>"Exactly." Patrick peered out at the sleeting storm from behind him. The gray day just sucked. "Sometimes relentless joy feels like—like—"</p>
<p>"A full-frontal assault?" Pete finished for him.</p>
<p>Patrick glanced down at his jingle bell ankle monitor. "A prison sentence."</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Sorry I ended it on a less-than-cheerful note. I promise it'll get worse.</p>
<p>This thing is growing bigger than I expected (yes, elf!Patrick is smirking). I *hope* I can wrap it up in three more chapters, but I understand if you're all sick of Christmas shit and cold air because so am I. Thanks for hanging in there and sticking with me, though. The engines at the ol' FanFiction Factory are running hot, all three shifts plus overtime.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. A new address on the same old loneliness</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Patrick meets a wizard and Pete learns that he won't get to thank Patrick for the memories.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I'd like to apologize in advance for this. I'd like to, but I can't. We all knew it was coming.  There's some potential content warning around Pete's mental health in this chapter, see the endnotes for details.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Patrick was busy cutting little corners out of folded-up coffee filters with a pair of safety scissors lifted from an elementary school classroom when Pete rifled through the box again and emerged with a battered notebook.</p>
<p>"Hah, so that's where that thing went."</p>
<p>"What thing? Your dignity? The ability to order a set of color-matched and themed ornaments from the Frontgate catalog?" Patrick lifted his head with a hopeful expression. "A Frontgate catalog itself? It's so much easier than trying to make giant snowflakes out of coffee filters." Pete's smile faded and Patrick hastily amended. "Not that there's anything not-fun about this."</p>
<p>"Eh? No, not you," Pete replied, but his attention was on the notebook. His eyes flickered as he flipped pages back and forth. "Huh. Wonder how this got in here. I thought I lost these after college."</p>
<p>"What is it?" Patrick craned his neck. He could see the spiky chicken-prints that he'd come to recognize as Pete's handwriting, but couldn't make out the soft-pencil smudges or the blobby ink words on the opposite page.</p>
<p>Pete snapped the notebook shut and shook his head. "Something I probably should have thrown out a while ago." He tossed the notebook back into the box with the other vintage ornaments from his childhood and unfolded his snowflake. "See? I told you that template would work."</p>
<p>Patrick squinted, then burst out laughing. "Darth Vaders? Your mom let kids in her classrooms cut out Darth Vader snowflakes? I have got to meet this woman." He stared down at his own pie-wedge of random slices, slivers, and snips and tried not to think about what he'd just said. <em>Hey, interacting with the family's not out of bounds. Sometimes you have to, in order to power up the magic. In the course of the job</em>.</p>
<p>He made a few last snips, then unfolded his own coffee filter. Stormtroopers.</p>
<p>Pete grinned. "It'll turn out better with sharp scissors but, like, I figured—ex-con, sharp objects might violate your parole or something."</p>
<p>"Have you ever considered the wisdom of letting kids make happy holiday decorations out of the bad guys?"</p>
<p>Pete raised his eyebrows. "Last year I took a side gig so I could get my mom the whole set of Christmas-themed Star Wars ornaments. My sister and brother and I made a whole Nativity scene out of them when she wasn't looking. It's on my sister's Instagram." At the end of his sentence, Pete's stomach gave a rumbling growl loud enough to demand its own social media presence.</p>
<p>Patrick threw down the scissors and seized the opportunity. "Hey, you wanna brave the elements and get something to eat?"</p>
<p>Pete taped the two snowflakes to the wall by the front door. "I could eat something besides pizza."</p>
<p>Patrick wanted to not be a Christmas elf for a little bit, so he raided Pete's closet and stole a hoodie that he tucked under his denim jacket. He also stole a pair of Pete's sweats, but was somewhat more disgruntled about it since the sweats were red and the hoodie was dark green so he still ended up in fucking Christmas colors in spite of himself. But at least the sweats gave him more room for his (Christmas) ball sac(k).</p>
<p>Pete took him two blocks over to a little retail block. The warm yellow light of the different shops spilled out into the blue-gray twilight of the outside. Blue and gold, Patrick thought. So much nicer than red and green.</p>
<p>His ruminations on colors distracted him enough to smash his face right into Pete's back when the latter drew up suddenly before a many-times-painted wooden door leading into a tiny shop whose windows hadn't seen glass cleaner since before the invention of electricity.</p>
<p>"We'll get dinner in a minute," Pete said. "I want to stop in here, first. This is the window I'd press my face against whenever the Black Friday sales kicked everything off."</p>
<p>"Just FYI? I'm a Christmas elf, and I am fully aware of the 'dusty little shop with Very Special Gifts and merry old proprietors who have Just The Thing for that Someone Special' gimmick."</p>
<p>Pete shot him a look over his shoulder and grabbed him by collar. "Come on." He pulled the door open and tossed Patrick through first.</p>
<p>The shop was not a junk shop, insofar as being full of trinkets and treasures and random cursed items with forty-five-minute backstories. The proprietor was not a wizened oldster with a twinkle in their eye or a flashing gold tooth.</p>
<p>Although the dark-skinned dude behind the counter did have some bling in his dental work in the form of silver labret snakebite piercings and beads in the short twists that came down over his pierced eyebrows.</p>
<p>"Pete Wentz, as I live and breathe!" He hopped the counter and held out a hand. Pete took it and the guy wrapped his other arm, inked from his wrists to up under his shirt and coming back out his collar, around Pete's shoulder. "I haven't seen you around in forever, man! Where you been hidin'?"</p>
<p>"Fuckin' day job, man. You know how it is." Pete grinned. He pulled Patrick forward, introducing him as his friend from the 'northern 'burbs.' "I brought him to the real magic kingdom. Patrick, this is Marcus and he's a wizard."</p>
<p>Marcus waggled his fingers and made an expansive gesture. "My kingdom is yours."</p>
<p>Marcus's "kingdom" turned out to be a record store. Mostly full of used records dating back decades, in plastic bags protecting the beat-up cardboard sleeves. There were some new releases, still shrink-wrapped, and a bin of what Marcus called a "sweet, sweet find" of albums that were still shrink-wrapped, but had been shrink-wrapped in the early 80s and featured a lot of soul artists with soft light, sequined outfits, and big hair. "I got that lot from an estate sale outside Detroit. Lady was a backup singer for a lot of Motown acts. Here, have a listen to this gem." Marcus snapped a pair of vintage headphones over Patrick's ears. The headphones were plugged into a portable record player in a tan tweed case with broken buckles.</p>
<p>The warm, round, mellow sounds of Otis Redding hit his ears and Patrick was enraptured. He met Pete's eyes across the counter. "I know this one!" He couldn't stop himself from singing along. "Merry Christmas, baby, sure did treat me nice," he crooned. "They don't play this one enough at the—northern 'burbs...I've got music on my radio, oh-oh-oh! I feel like I'm gonna kiss you, standing beneath that mistletoe—"</p>
<p>He lifted his head up from admiring the album cover to find Pete and Marcus both staring at him and clamped his mouth closed. "Sorry." He lifted the cans from his head.</p>
<p>Marcus made big eyes. "Sorry, my ass." He shook his head. "Ain't often a little white boy can pull off Otis." He clapped a hand on Patrick's shoulder.</p>
<p>"Um, thanks?" Patrick ducked his head.</p>
<p>Pete put the two albums he'd been holding on the counter, then added the one Patrick had been singing to. Marcus rang him up and said, "Hey, man. You should come back around to jam again. Scene could use a guy like you again."</p>
<p>Patrick was only looking in Pete's direction because the purples and golds of the album cover of Purple Rain had caught his eye on one of the display shelves. Otherwise, he would have missed the fade of Pete's expression. The grin stretching Pete's lips hadn't moved, but Patrick zeroed right in on the sudden guarded look in his eyes. And when Pete skipped answering in favor of a, "Thanks, dude. You have a good holiday," over the crinkle of the plastic bag holding the albums, a warning ran down Patrick's spine like a melting icicle.</p>
<p>With a wave, Patrick followed Pete out the door of the warm golden-and-dusty shop and back into the blues and purples of the evening.</p>
<p>After they picked up takeout (chicken gyros from a little greasy spoon run by a Greek grandma who yelled at her grown sons a lot but smiled beatifically at all the customers), Patrick tucked the warm bag up against his jacket and hurried to catch up with Pete. "So...you didn't give Marcus an answer when he invited you to the jam session?"</p>
<p>Pete hunched his shoulders and sighed. "It's complicated." He hugged the bag of records he was carrying tight to his chest and stole glances at Patrick. "I'm fun to jam with, good enough to fill in when somebody's sick or bailed on a house gig, but whenever something regular happens, it ends up falling apart." Pete shook his head. "I just...can't make it stick. It's like Robert Frost said—nothing gold can stay. I've been in seven bands and they all—" He flicked his fingers outward. "—imploded, or fizzled out."</p>
<p>Patrick cocked his head. "Yeah, but you were <em>good enough</em> to be in <em>seven</em> bands." He didn't understand how Pete could <em>not</em> see that as cool as hell. Was this why he'd been sent? To make Pete see how many people needed him for the little things?</p>
<p>"Thanks, Mr. Bright Side." Pete rolled his eyes.</p>
<p>"It's my job to show you the bright side," Patrick retorted. "Christmas elf, remember?" Pete was starting to worry him. "All those people needed you for their gigs."</p>
<p>"It's not about that. I wouldn't care if I was just in one band if we stuck together." He slanted a glance sideways. "Wouldn't you rather be one person's Christmas elf?"</p>
<p>Patrick froze, alarm bells going off in the back of his mind. "No! That's the worst idea ever!" He was not prepared for the internal gut-punch and the filters weren't in place when he blurted, coming to a stop right in the intersection they were in the middle of.</p>
<p>Pete turned back, grabbed his hand, and pulled him along. "Jeez, just a suggestion, dude."</p>
<p>Patrick stumbled over the curb and ended up against the polished limestone side of a bank, still shaking his head. "You don't understand. It's not allowed, like, at all, ever." He looked away, biting his lip and cradling the gyros like they were some sort of shield made of ablative cucumber slices and anti-aircraft tzatziki sauce. "You don't even remember us come February."</p>
<p>Now it was Pete's turn to lose it. "Wait—what the hell, dude?"</p>
<p>Patrick pushed away from the building, picking up speed as he walked. "Come on. You don't go around hearing people's tales of Christmas elf visitations on Oprah, do you?"</p>
<p>"Of course not! It'd be crazy. That shit belongs on Jerry Springer."</p>
<p>Patrick kicked him. "People. Don't. Remember. Their. Elves," he said. "Which is why I have to make you see how important you are before Christmas, and you have to remember that part. That's the important part, not me."</p>
<p>They reached the entry to Pete's apartment. Somebody in the kitchen of the Vietnamese place yelled something that drifted out the propped-open back door. Pete stared at Patrick. Patrick stared back at Pete.</p>
<p>"You mean—I'm really not going to remember you, not just keep it secret to keep people from thinking I was crazy."</p>
<p>Patrick shook his head. "People don't remember who you are or what you did, only how you made them feel."</p>
<p>"Maya Angelou. Don't go throwing poets back into my face, you will not win that war." Pete's lips pressed together in a firm line. "What if I don't want to forget?"</p>
<p>Patrick ducked his head. "Doesn't work that way. The memories will change. It's a side-effect of the radiation. You'll remember me as—as somebody else."</p>
<p>Pete shook his head. "No. You can't mess with me like that, Patrick." He unlocked the door and stomped up the steps. "You can't make me—yeah, hi, Mrs. Lao, we were just doing some last-minute shopping." Pete shoved the sticky door to the apartment open and Patrick followed him inside, waving meekly at the elderly Vietnamese woman who peered out from her doorway down the hall.</p>
<p>Dinner ended up being a silent affair, with Pete staring hard at the TV, pretending to be enraptured with <em>'Stalked By My Pizza Delivery—At Christmas!'</em> while Patrick sulked at the table. It was a hazard of the job, getting Involved with assignments, although usually, it was the ones with kids who sniffed out his elfin nature. But with kids, you could at least bring them in as co-conspirators, or write them off as "imaginative" when they spouted off to mom or dad or Aunt Sophie that the new dinner guest was actually an elf.</p>
<p>It was his own damn fault for dealing straight with Pete in the first place. He should have pretended to be a real estate agent who was going to buy up the block and kick out all the tenants. <em>I should have been the villain</em>, he thought as he finally, silently, gathered up the wrappers and tossed them into the trash. <em>At least then I'd be playing a part</em>.</p>
<p>**</p>
<p>Patrick knew something wasn't right when he woke up in Pete's bed without Pete. He listened for the electronic flicker of the TV but there was only silence. Pete's side of the bed was cold and undisturbed.</p>
<p>He sat up, rubbed his eyes, and donned his reindeer sweatshirt over a pair of red and green boxer shorts before poking his head out the door.</p>
<p>Pete wasn't in the living room, but a little poking around in the pre-dawn gloom found him in one of the spare rooms, sitting on the floor in a pile of blankets, propped up against the wall, knees drawn up to his chest. He had a notebook balanced on them and was scratching furiously over the pages with the stub of a pencil.</p>
<p>"Pete?"</p>
<p>Pete pencil-scratched for a few moments more before looking up. "Oh. Hey." His voice came out rusty.</p>
<p>Patrick frowned. "What are you doing in here, dude?"</p>
<p>Pete tossed the notebook aside and rested his chin on his knees. He wore a pair of sweats that looked like they'd been around since right after Mrs. O'Leary's cow started the Great Fire and a worn-thin DePaul hoodie with the hood drawn up over his head. "Couldn't sleep."</p>
<p>"Look, I shouldn't have said—"</p>
<p>"'S'not you, dude. You straight-up told me when you first broke in what you were." He didn't meet Patrick's eyes. "This just...I get like this sometimes."</p>
<p>Patrick sighed and crouched down. "I still shouldn't have said anything. If it helps, it's not so bad. You'll still remember me, just...not as me."</p>
<p>"How is that not worse?" Pete hugged his knees. "How do you deal with being forgotten about? Aren't you afraid you'll—disappear?"</p>
<p>Patrick shook his head. "Is that what you're afraid of?"</p>
<p>Pete nodded. "I'm just...I'm fading away, right in front of my own eyes." He held up a hand to illustrate.</p>
<p>Patrick got a chill from his words, faint as they were (and for an elf from the North Pole, that was saying something). "Pete, you're not going to be forgotten. I won't let that happen."</p>
<p>Pete shook his head. "I'm just...can't sleep...can't fade away..." As he trailed off, he leaned to one side until he was curled up on his blanket-pile.</p>
<p>"Pete?" He scooted up closer and wrapped his arms around Pete's body. "Sleep, okay? I'll stay right here with you.</p>
<p>"Will you watch me? Make sure I don't fade away?" Pete trembled. But he turned in Patrick's arms and held tight to his shirt. "Just until I fall asleep."</p>
<p>Patrick squeezed tighter. "I'm from the North Pole. If there's one thing we're very good at, it's surveillance. I see you when you're sleeping, I'll know when you're awake."</p>
<p>**</p>
<p>When Pete was fully asleep, Patrick slipped back out of the room, leaving the door cracked open. He showered, brushed his teeth (the candy-cane toothbrush came with his field kit and Pete had already remarked on it), and checked on Pete again.</p>
<p>He pulled his little logbook out and flipped to the dossier section. <em>See, Home Office fucked up</em>. Nowhere—<em>nowhere</em>—did it say 'adjust parameters in accordance with subject's mental health condition.' He flipped to the back of the Field Notes section and scrawled another request. <em>Assistance needed. Andy, I need some fucking help, here!</em></p>
<p>He did doze on the couch, hoping for Andy to show up, but he woke again to a distinct lack of goat-legged assistance. He peeked in on Pete and found him curled in the blankets, back to the door. He closed the door again and cleared off the dining table from arts and crafts time. As he put the materials back into the box, he found the notebook that Pete had tossed away. <em>Don't snoop, don't snoop</em>—</p>
<p>Patrick was from the Pole. And the Pole was naturally good at surveillance. Of course he snooped. He opened the notebook to a random page and worked out some of the chicken-scratch. <em>Spent most of last night dragging the lake for the corpses of all my past mistakes...I miss old friends and play-it-agains...I'm half-doomed but you could be my semi-sweet...Last year's wishes are this year's apologies...I want to be known for my hits not just my missus</em>...</p>
<p>Patrick lost himself in reading the poems. Some of them read like advice to younger siblings, others like unwritten letters to exes best left off the drunk-dialing contact list, still others were like—beat-poetry memoirs capturing moments in time of a younger Pete waiting for his life to start. <em>Get me out of this one-horse town, waste this night</em>.</p>
<p><em>Stood on my roof and tried to see you forgetting about me</em>.</p>
<p><em>The way your make-up stains my pillowcase like I'll never be the same</em>.</p>
<p>
  <em>The ribbon on my wrist says 'Do not open until Christmas.'</em>
</p>
<p>The words swept over him like a wave that was gentle, but relentless, finding their way into all the little cracks and gaps and empty spaces where his memories didn't quite fill in the blanks. What's more, he started recognizing a certain cadence to them—a heartbeat. Pete's beating pulse, sometimes out of time, but in an elegant way that made the pauses anticipatory and invited key and rhythm changes. Patrick was already mixing them up, finding passages that rhymed, or whose syllables matched beats. He flipped pages back and forth and ran his fingers over the pages. <em>These are—there are</em> songs <em>here</em>.</p>
<p>And there were bands who didn't want him? <em>Are they stupid? This guy is incredible!</em></p>
<p>When he lifted his head from the notebook again, hours had passed and Pete still hadn't come out, Patrick returned to the second bedroom, this time with a cup of plain tea. Pete was in the same position as Patrick had left him last time and Patrick started to worry when his greeting wasn't answered.</p>
<p>"Hey—hey, Pete. Come on, that can't be comfortable, dude. At least let me get you into bed or something." He scooted around to the wall and peered down at Pete. In the low light of the hallway outside of the darkened room, he saw that Pete's eyes were open and glassy, but unseeing.</p>
<p>A lance of dread shot through him. His hands and feet went numb, his stomach twisted and flopped. Patrick was transported out of time and place, back to another darkness, this one a parking lot, lit cold with sodium lights and another—somebody—whose expressive eyes had also gone glassy and—</p>
<p><em>Lifeless</em>.</p>
<p>
  <em>Too late.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>Not enough.</em>
</p>
<p>The teacup fell from his hands and spilled hot liquid across the floor.</p>
<p>He dropped to his knees on the hardwood floor and felt nothing through nerveless limbs.</p>
<p>"Pete!"</p>
<p>Heedless of the tea seeping into the knees of his pants, Patrick ran frantic hands over Pete's shoulders, turning him over, tipping his head back, feeling his neck for—<em>please be there, please be there</em>—</p>
<p>Pete blinked.</p>
<p>Patrick's fingers fell on warm skin. Alive skin. Pulse fluttering beneath.</p>
<p>The spear of dread broke loose from his ribcage, letting out a gush of relief so profound, Patrick's head spun. His vision blurred at the edges, purple spots appeared in front of his eyes. The gray overtook him and turned to black.</p>
<p>**</p>
<p>Everything inside and out was gray. Pete drifted in and out of a colorless fugue punctuated with the textures of every failure every ex had ever thrown back in his face. He knew he should have taken an Ambien and gotten sleep, but when his brain started heating up, he was certain he'd be able to handle it—that his good mood with Patrick would be enough to float him up over the river of hot lava that lurked in the low troughs of his gray matter.</p>
<p>Patrick checked on him twice. Pete wanted to reach for him, explain that this wasn't him, but when he thought about moving, the immense weight of his screw-ups pinned him down and taped his mouth shut, while they glued his eyes open to bear silent witness.</p>
<p>But then when Patrick came the third time, the sharp edge of fear in his voice, the anguish, stirred Pete enough to focus on the elf. He registered Patrick's fall, Patrick's hands on him, desperate murmurs from a panicked throat and then Patrick, slumping forward, gasping for air.</p>
<p>Pete blinked, and Patrick collapsed on him in relief.</p>
<p>"P-Patrick?" It took supreme effort to force rusty sounds out of his mouth. He felt a thousand years old as he stretched a hand out to poke weakly at Patrick's shoulder. "Hey."</p>
<p>Patrick lifted his head. His face was even paler than usual, with two mottled spots of red at his cheeks. His clouded eyes cleared when he shook his head. "Pete, I thought—" He didn't finish the sentence.</p>
<p>"Oh. Oh, dude, I'm sorry, man." Pete drew his hand back into his blanket nest. He turned away. "Didn't your Christmas elf intelligence warn you you got a hopeless case with a rotten brain?"</p>
<p>Patrick grabbed his shoulders. "No," he said, and Pete felt the force in the elf's words, like something pressing on his brain from outside, instead of in. He wondered if it was Christmas magic or some elfin magic shit or just Patrick. "You are not hopeless."</p>
<p>"You gonna magic this away?" Pete pointed at his head. "'Cause if you did, you could make a fortune."</p>
<p>Patrick shook his head, the stricken cast to his features making Pete feel even more of a failure. <em>You broke a Christmas elf</em>, his evil little voice whispered. <em>You broke Christmas</em>.</p>
<p>"Magic can only fix magic," Patrick said. "Magic can't fix medicine. Do you have something you can take for this? Or someone I should call?"</p>
<p>Pete shook his head. It felt like moving boulders. "If 'm like this, it's already too late for the drugs. It'll pass. Just—don't let me break you, too." Pete put the covers back over his head, hiding his shame.</p>
<p>It was his imagination, but as Patrick closed the door behind him, Pete might have heard a soft, "Too late."</p>
<p>**</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I'm sorry. Throw rotten vegetables at me on Tumblr at @glitterandrocketfuel I *think* I'm on track to wrap this up in 12 chapters, but that may be a bit optimistic...</p>
<p>Pete goes through a pretty low point in this chapter and Patrick fears the worst. It's not graphic or overly detailed, but if you're sensitive to it, consider this a "proceed with caution" flag.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0011"><h2>11. Better off against worse for wear</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Working the holiday shift sucks even when that's your whole existence, Tech Support blows even if you're a magical being and it's totally understandable if you're feeling a little homicidal. That's why they call it Trouble*shooting.*</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This chapter is the fuse that gets blown when you see the calendar counting down but the task list piling up. At some point, you say, "fuck it" and start cutting out snowflakes made out of stormtrooper heads because that's the least important thing on the list, but the only thing you can control (or be trusted with) right then is a pair of third-grade safety scissors.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Patrick stood in the kitchen with a can of whipped cream in one hand and a little airplane-bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream in the other, facing matched mugs full of dark roast and hyperventilated.</p>
<p><em>I was not prepared</em>.</p>
<p>He kept his eyes open and fixed on the mugs, both of which had a cartoon dachshund—one mug featured the rear end, while the other featured the front end, so when they were stood together, they created one dog. On the opposite side of the two mugs, the graphic read, "You love me for my wiener (dog)." Patrick separated the mugs and the message distorted, becoming two different message—"You love my wiener" and "me for (dog)."</p>
<p>An abrupt, humorless laugh escaped his lips. <em>This is why you don't belong on assignment</em>. The laugh turned wet and hiccup-y as he fumbled for his tiny notebook. <em>Patrick Stump, ID 2604 requesting emergency assistance</em>, he scrawled in the Log. <em>Again</em>.</p>
<p>The word invoked images behind his eyelids and he knew they were supposed to be of That Other Time. Instead of pushing them away this time, he tried to reach for them and found them as ephemeral as smoke. He could see, etched on the backs of his eyelids, rumpled bedsheets, spilled pills, unseeing eyes. He felt cold skin against his palm, terror freezing his limbs, and the ringing of the Christmas Day bells. <em>It's not Pete</em>. It wasn't Pete. Someone else, from another time, another place, another—</p>
<p>
  <em>—life?</em>
</p>
<p><em>It's not Pete. That wouldn't make any sense. Pete's right here</em>.</p>
<p>But the images burned into the backs of his eyelids told him different.</p>
<p>His hand shook as he brought the Bailey's bottle to his lips.</p>
<p>When he lowered his hand, motion from the living room caught his attention. He peered over the kitchen counter into the living room where the little fake tree stood, naked and dark, next to the pile of malfunctioning Christmas lights.</p>
<p>The lights had moved, turning from a darkened snarl on the floor into a tangled ball. When did—</p>
<p>The lights flared to life.</p>
<p>Oh.</p>
<p>Patrick tossed the little bottle to the side and rounded the kitchen counter, eyes narrowed as the snarl formed itself into an oversized head.</p>
<p>The blazing snarl bisected itself as some of the bulbs flickered and died, forming a gap of darkness in the middle, supplanted by two bright tangles of overpowered clusters of lights burning bright enough that Patrick could feel the heat.</p>
<p>"Home Office Helpline. May I have your name?"</p>
<p>"I need backup," Patrick said. "Help. Or—or something."</p>
<p>"Understood," the thin voice said with a pleasant, robotic tone. "If I could just confirm your identity first."</p>
<p>Patrick rolled his eyes. "I requested help through my <em>personal</em> Field Notes, which are only accessible to <em>my person</em>. My help request contained my <em>personal identifying information</em>. Why don't you people have a system that knows this, or that at least stops asking me my <em>personal identifying information</em> if you're going to immediately <em>forget it!</em>"</p>
<p>"No need to be rude, Mister Stump." The robotic voice lost its robotic neutrality.</p>
<p>"There! You knew who I was all along!" Patrick took off his bingo hat and ran his hand through his hair before replacing it.</p>
<p>The snarl of Christmas lights took on a distinct haughtiness in its tangle. "Home Office has already provided appropriate requisitioned materials and consumables for this assignment as determined by the actuarial—"</p>
<p>"<em>Fuck</em> the actuarial tables!" Patrick cut off the messenger. "I've got a problem, here!"</p>
<p>"Is your problem related to family of the assignment? Please say 'yes' or 'no' to answer the question."</p>
<p>"No, it's—"</p>
<p>"Is your problem related to friends of the assignment? Please say—"</p>
<p>"No! No, no, <em>no!</em>"</p>
<p>"Would you like to report a lost or stolen Christmas ball? Please note that you have...zero...gratuities left in your Christmas ball account and you will be subject to a surcharge for replacement—"</p>
<p>"No, I did <em>not lose</em> my Christmas ball!" Patrick's fists clenched. He knew that punching the Christmas lights wouldn't actually be felt by the support on the other end, but goddamn, it'd be nice to hit something solid. "My problem is with the assignment himself!"</p>
<p>"Remember that relentless joy requires consistent application and the effects can take some time to increase the localized ambiance to levels that soften the suggestibility of the assignment target. Consult the Troubleshooting section of your Field Guide for additional approaches to increase the relentless joy dynamic. Suggestion: try baking holiday treats with your assignment, or make a holiday-inspired home decor display."</p>
<p>"That is a <em>stupid</em> idea!" Patrick hissed. "He doesn't need cookies or a fucking <em>pinecone wreath!</em> He needs help! <em>I</em> need help!"</p>
<p>"Be sure to double-check the math on the appropriate algorithmic equation for Christmas magic dust application relative to the solubility of the surfaces upon which you are applying. Other troubleshooting situations can be located in your Field Guide. Thank you for calling Home Office. Have a Relentlessly Joyful Holiday!"</p>
<p>The Christmas lights collapsed just as Patrick lost his final shreds of control and dived onto the snarl with hands curved into claws.</p>
<p>He landed on his stomach, dimmed Christmas lights digging into his palms, without even an imaginary neck to choke underneath him.</p>
<p>The anger, as much as it fueled him, drained away with the dimming of the lights. "Fucking—goddammit." He pushed up off the pile and slumped against the TV stand, staring up at the sad, thin, plastic tree. His head thunked against the wall, knocking his hat askew and sending the Santa peak down in front of his face. When he moved to flick the point out of his face, his fingers came away wet with 'relentless joy.'</p>
<p>He shook himself out of the tangle of faulty lights and jammed his hand down his pants to pull out the Christmas ball. He uncapped it and shook out probably a little too much elfin magic dust into his palm. He threw most of it onto the pile of lights and the sad plastic tree, then licked his hand to clear the last of it (yes, the radioactivity probably would hurt, but Patrick wasn't really concerned with hurting himself right now).</p>
<p>He pulled out the 'x-box' and started unloading Pete's ornaments and craft supplies while the elfin dust did its thing. His fingers brushed over the notebook again and he took it out, carefully setting it aside. It fell open to another page.</p>
<p><em>My love for you is a chapel in a hospital. I take chances and I take pills and you only hold me up like this because you get nostalgic for disaster</em>.</p>
<p><em>I wrote it better than you felt it</em>. <em>I'm a better lead role in other people's dreams than my own</em>.</p>
<p><em>I'm coming apart at the seams</em>.</p>
<p><em>Buzz buzz buzz, Doc, there's a hole where something was</em>.</p>
<p>The magic cured over the wires and filaments and the lights sputtered to life. With the amount of magic he'd used, he could have legitimately just wiggled his nose and the lights would do the work of wrapping around the tree for him, but Patrick didn't play that way. Not for Pete.</p>
<p>Instead, he wrapped the lights around the tree himself, winding where he could, shoving knots and snarls into the branches where he needed to. He made a try to hum a few carols, to build up the "localized ambiance," but the words kept coming from Pete's notebook instead of "Holiday Songs For <s>Every Mood</s> The Relentlessly Joyful" that every elf had to memorize from cover to cover and not ask about the title or why the last quarter of the book's pages had gone missing.</p>
<p>He had to change some of the words to fit the melodies in his head, rearrange sentence structure in others while he hung ornaments, but the words and the tune wouldn't quite leave him alone. When he ran out of ornaments, he started making more coffee-filter snowflakes and paper chains made out of red and green construction paper. When he ran out of Pete's words or couldn't make them fit right away, he hummed the melodies until the words rearranged themselves. When he ran out of tree, he looped the construction paper up over the TV and taped it to the wall.</p>
<p>It wasn't joy, but it was relentless.</p>
<p>**</p>
<p>Contrary to what he'd told Patrick, Pete wasn't just sleeping his way through this. And it certainly wasn't Patrick's fault that The Gray chose that particular revelation as a weak point to bust through Pete's barriers and take over. But it did inform how Pete was trying to deal with it.</p>
<p>He couldn't move for a time after Patrick left him alone, so he stared at the bright sliver of light through the crack in the door that Patrick left open. Eventually, the light seeped behind his eyes to cut into his brain, just enough to get him back upright, hunched into his hoodie and blanket, with his current notebook balanced on his knees.</p>
<p>He felt around for the pencil stub and located where he left off by feel. Sometimes the Gray was numb, a fog that paralyzed him, trapped him alone in a room with his self-loathing. Other times, the Gray was edged with a hot dull red that seared the edges of his thoughts, turning them into knives in need of a surface to carve.</p>
<p>This time, the red edge dug his pencil into the surface of his notebook, taking thin slices of the past few days from his memory and laying them out to be dissected in detail on the pages that he couldn't see. It was an act of rebellion, best done in the dark, trapped and well-concealed in places so secret that he himself was in danger of forgetting them. Written in code and metaphor, an intertextual language of movie quotes and passages from well-read books, references to songs written by other people, the tastes of colors and the sound of the texture of Patrick's skin.</p>
<p>The rules of Christmas magic, according to Patrick, dictated that Patrick's memory would be taken from him, removed from his brain with a precision that science couldn't even come close to matching.</p>
<p>But not if he cut it out first.</p>
<p>**</p>
<p>Now that he knew Pete was safe, the spit and baling twine holding Patrick together was disintegrating. So when he heard the commotion on the fire escape, his hand went to the Christmas ball, ready for defensive maneuvers until he recognized the monster trying to break in.</p>
<p>"Andy!" Patrick hiss-whispered as the Krampus blew in through the open window on a swirl of ice crystals. "It's about fucking time!" Patrick's voice was tight with barely-contained anger. In fact, most of his elfin body shook with it.</p>
<p>"You're not my only job, you know." Andy's hooves klopped quietly as he maneuvered himself inside. "There are terrible children all over the world with toes to be nibbled until they see the error of their wicked ways." He carried, over one shaggy, leathery arm, a wicker basket wrapped in festive, crinkly cellophane in red and green, topped with a red and green plaid bow that was as garish as it was ornate.</p>
<p>"I'm the only one who needs your help, you walking carpet!"</p>
<p>"That Star Wars reference isn't the insult you think it is," Andy said mildly, folding his backward-knees primly to the side. He held up the basket. "I signed for this on Pete's behalf from the FedEx person. She was not easy to convince."</p>
<p>Patrick plunked the basket—heavy son of a bitch—down on the counter. Through the cellophane, he could see an array of crackers, jellies, wrapped wedges of cheese, thick sticks of beef log and summer sausage—he filed that away for later, stubbornly insisting that there would be a later—and a gold-foil wrapped Heavenly Ham. All topped with a blandly corporate "appropriate Yuletide greetings" card from "your friends at Gutter Guard." Then he turned to face Andy.</p>
<p>The thing about Patrick was that he generally approached everything in one of three ways: angry, slutty, or drunk. With Pete still huddled in his blanket, Patrick was too afraid to go for the more than the airplane-sample bottles he'd found in the back of Pete's cabinets (left there by the previous inhabitant, who was apparently some sort of IT consultant and spent a lot of time on airplanes). And with the parole board frowning upon any sort of improper relationships between parolees and their handlers, Patrick was too afraid to put the moves on the Krampus. So angry it was, even if he felt a little guilty because Andy was such a calming person.</p>
<p>But this was important, and angry was the only thing driving him right now. He sat back down at the table, took up the craft scissors and continued to cut red and green strips of paper chain.</p>
<p>Andy waited.</p>
<p>Out of the corner of Patrick's eye, he could see Andy's attention on the goofy little plastic tree on top of the box. The plastic and metal branches drooped low with the weight of the mismatched ornaments, and when Patrick ran out of hooks, he'd just stuffed things into the spaces between the branches. As they watched, a coffee filter snowflake depicting C-3P0 heads between bars that were supposed to be lightsabers tipped over and fluttered to the ground.</p>
<p>"I can't do it again." Patrick shook his head, the misery curling him in and around himself.</p>
<p>Andy's terrifying features twisted in sympathy. "Look, I know you've been...unwell, as the official documentation states. But you have to see this one through. It's part of your rehabilitation." Andy put a clawed, furry hand on his shoulder. "When you get thrown off, the thing you gotta do is grab that reindeer by the antlers, look him in the eye, and then climb back on and ride him until he stops bucking."</p>
<p>The flash of sharp teeth was the Krampus version of saucy, with the long, pointed tongue flicking between Andy's extended canines, but it didn't make Patrick really feel like delivering an innuendo-in-kind response. But he was a professional, and some habits just came naturally, even when they didn't come enthusiastically. "Fuck's sake, Andy, riding him is not the problem. It's the end of the ride."</p>
<p>He covered his face with both hands and scrubbed down.</p>
<p>"Patrick, you've come so far. You've served your time, you were a model prisoner, and you finally figured out the correct response to the parole board about your...experience. See this one through and you could find yourself free and clear. Especially the 'free' part."</p>
<p>Patrick peeked at Andy through his fingers. The Krampus had chosen an interesting way of saying things and he had to ask about it. "I just told them I understood that, um, my behavior, had been an... artefact of the consequences of my choice to, um, breach the boundaries of Christmas elfery. I fell in with a bad crowd and I made poor choices." He didn't bother to summon anything that might put conviction in the statement. His parole didn't hinge on conviction, just compliance.</p>
<p>"It wasn't the affair with the Easter bunny." Andy shook his shaggy, horned head. "And the St. Patrick's Day gang were bound to single you out as soon as they learned of a Christmas elf named Patrick."</p>
<p>"It wasn't the booze and it wasn't the boner that got me sent to the klink." Patrick sneered. Andy didn't deserve it, but he stood in for the authorities, so he got to be the target. "It was my mouth. I wouldn't shut up." He ran agitated hands through his hair. "And now it's all happening again!"</p>
<p>"The parole board recognized that you might have been...<em>misled</em> to believe that something <em>might</em> have happened that did not, which <em>could</em> be chalked up to residual mind-altering influence from the leprechauns." Andy tapped his horn meaningfully and tugged his ear. "Part of your rehabilitation included music, didn't it? Why don't we have some now while we generate some relentless joy for your assignment?"</p>
<p>Patrick tensed and turned away, message received. Home Office, official visit, this call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes.</p>
<p>From the tangle of his beard, Andy produced a miniature Yule Log. More like a Yule branch. Or maybe a Yule stick. It was portable and log-shaped and decorated with a line of holly and mistletoe berries, red and white, and two holly leaves, pointed away from each other. Andy pressed one of the mistletoe berries and sound burst out of the hollow ends of the log—er, stick.</p>
<p>A woman's voice sang out, clear and true, accompanied by tonal bells in harmony. <em>I cannot bring you comf</em>—</p>
<p>Andy hastily flicked the forward holly leaf and the playlist jumped to a new song. With horns. Feliz Navidad, Jose Feliciano's cheery baritone sang out.</p>
<p>"Wait!" Patrick reached out towards the stick. "What was that other one?"</p>
<p>"Oh, nothing," Andy said, very casually, over the horns and mariachis. "Just something...left in the buffer. An...artefact, if you will, from an older era." He stared hard at Patrick. "Now—"</p>
<p>Patrick turned his head again. The tree lights in the corner blurred under his gaze. "He's in there, Andy." He pointed towards the hallway leading to the second bedroom. "Alone. In the dark." Patrick hunched into himself while Jose wished him a Merry Christmas. "Hurting." He stole a glance at Andy. "No amount of Christmas magic can fix what medicine can, and he's beyond medicine right now." Patrick leaned against the shaggy Krampus, inhaling the scent of cinnamon, moss, goat, barnyard, and whatever else Andy kept hidden in that shaggy coat of his.</p>
<p>Andy's claws made a tik-tik-tik, tikka-tik-tik on the wooden surface of the end table as they listened in silence. Jose gave way to some Christmas songs that sounded a little far from the Kringle-approved playlist that filtered through the air at the Pole. "You know," the Krampus said, after a fashion, "There exists a space. Between magic and medicine. Between the hocus-pocus and the healing focus that fills the empty places and the silent spaces and does something neither magic nor medicine can."</p>
<p>Patrick didn't reply. He shouldn't ask. Andy was still part of Home Office, even if he seemed to be trying to avoid the party line. Patrick should just accept the version of events everyone else seemed to, and upend that Christmas ball full of magic dust until the entire block was radioactive with Relentless Joy, except—<em>Fuck it. I have to know</em>. "You—"</p>
<p>"Shh." Andy pressed a clawed finger to Patrick's lips. "Just <em>listen</em> for what's <em>in between</em>."</p>
<p>Strains of a plaintive minor melody filtered out of the YulePod, then Shane MacGowan's nicotine-sanded voice. Christmas eve, babe...in the drunk tank...old man said to me...won't see another one...</p>
<p>"God," he muttered around Andy's finger. "This one's a downer. Not as bad as that Live Aid embarrassment but—"</p>
<p>"Shh. <em>Listen</em>. And when you have to, <em>look</em>."</p>
<p>Patrick wasn't sure what he should look for in old songs that had fallen out of favor on the Official Playlist, but Andy's meaningful gaze had to be telling him something. Kirsty MacColl's scornful contralto cut through MacGowan's as she sang of wasted dreams and broken promises and Patrick thought about every poor bastard that had spent Christmas with the company of little more than a bottle and a belly full of bad memories.</p>
<p>MacGowan would have sent a firm, double-barreled middle finger to Relentless Joy and followed it up with the two-fingered UK version and flicked a lit cigarette onto the top of the tree in the middle of the Pole proper. Radio still played his song, people still requested it and there had to be a reason—</p>
<p><em>Of course</em>.</p>
<p><em>Duh</em>.</p>
<p>Patrick felt stupid but also sort of that he knew all along. <em>Music</em> lived between magic and medicine, incorporating a little of both. <em>Harmony</em> sat at the intersection of hocus pocus and healing.</p>
<p>He lowered his voice to a desperate whisper, "you believe me, don't you? Maybe just a little?"</p>
<p>Andy's face suddenly shuttered. "I believe," he said carefully, "that Home Office is a...<em>system</em> that requires certain things to be unequivocally true in order to continuously function." He nodded slowly. "So if one of those things is...something <em>besides</em> true...the system...rejects the evidence as a function of self-preservation...in order to continue operation based on an <em>assumption</em> of truth."</p>
<p>Patrick dropped his hand into his lap. "Andy...dude...I am so not equipped to understand that."</p>
<p>"Just...some things can be true and not-true at the same time." Andy rose, his hooves making clop-clopping noises over the scuffed hardwood flooring as he made his way towards the fire escape window. "You still play, right? Make bells ring, Patrick."</p>
<p>Patrick held it open while the krampus climbed out onto the fire escape, making a lunge just in time to keep his second horn from catching on the edge of the sash. As the krampus disappeared in a sudden snow devil that curled through the alley, Patrick heard a whisper. "I believe you."</p>
<p>**</p>
<p>Pete <em>surfaced</em>.</p>
<p>It was kind of like being a submarine, on a deep sea mission to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, where there was no light but immense pressure, and coming up for air had to be carefully timed so that your whole body didn't explode out your blood vessels. Crawling, agonizing and slow, up out of cold darkness, with lead weights around your ankles and monsters just below your feet, ready to pull you back down.</p>
<p>One by one, the bands around his chest, arms, and legs relaxed. Not released—the Gray never really left him, it only ever eased up, curled in on itself once it had been fed. Sated, it curled its suckers and tentacles back into itself, gradually tinting his world with watery, washed-out hues. The incredible weight of the Gray pressing his limbs into immobility eased and he realized—as he did—that he'd been tightly clenched, coiled against the suffocating pressure of the Gray and only aware of it due to its absence.</p>
<p>Sitting up hurt. His muscles unclenched one by one, his bones creaked like coffin lids opening after a century of decay. The door to the second bedroom screamed on its hinges as he shuffled to the bathroom, too tired to close the bathroom door after him.</p>
<p>Which was why the rest of him came out of the Gray with a girlish scream when a pale face appeared in the mirror behind him.</p>
<p>"Patrick!"</p>
<p><em>I forgot Patrick! I forgot Patrick already! No</em>—</p>
<p>"Easy, Pete. I've got you." Patrick wrapped his arms around Pete from behind. "I'm here. It's okay."</p>
<p>Even though he'd just fought through the excruciating process of fighting free of the hold the Grey had over him, Pete folded into Patrick's arms, hugging back with every bit of strength he had. Patrick's arms tightened around him and everything unlocked, pouring out of him in sobs.</p>
<p>Patrick just held on tighter.</p>
<p>"I'm sorry," Pete blubbered. "I'm a mess, I'm useless I'm—"</p>
<p>"Hey." Patrick's fingers dug points into his back. He leaned just far enough away to focus on Pete. "I'm here. That's all that matters."</p>
<p>"And when you're not?"</p>
<p>"I'm here now," Patrick said firmly.</p>
<p>"But am I?" The lights above the vanity wavered in his vision. Pete saw green and purple spots and one was big enough to obliterate Patrick's entire face. <em>No, not yet, please—he's got these blue-green riptide eyes, a bottom lip like a strawberry, a voice</em>—</p>
<p>"You're here, too." Patrick's hands went around to grab him by the upper arms. He gave him a little shake for emphasis. "Dude, I can smell you."</p>
<p>A helpless, inadvertent laugh crept out of his windpipe. "I—I usually do reek after these...episodes. I'll get a shower."</p>
<p>Patrick made to step back, but Pete couldn't seem to unclench his fingers from around the elf's shirt sleeves.</p>
<p>"I'm sorry I—" He hung his head, shame pooling in his armpits.</p>
<p>Patrick ducked his head. "Hey—none of that." He shuffled around, turning them in a weird, clumsy dance until they were half in the shower cubicle, then Patrick turned the shower on and dragged them both into the hot spray, clothes and all.</p>
<p>Pete blurred again, but this time it was a warm, bright blur that sounded like Patrick, singing Jingle Bells, only with the Batman smells lyrics. Patrick assured him he totally had plans for naked shower time again, when Pete was in better shape.</p>
<p>He...let Patrick take care of him and it was only after they were out on the couch, both wrapped in the crocheted afghan, contemplating the enormous gift basket from the Gutter Guard people.</p>
<p>"It's Spencer, really. They send one to him, but he and his wife are vegetarians. So I get it, but I usually give it to my mom and dad. What the fuck am I going to do with a whole-ass ham?"</p>
<p>"Slap it?" Patrick suggested.</p>
<p>Pete chuckled again. Every time Patrick said something funny, a shard of sunlight broke through the murky waters of his slow ascent. He unwrapped the basket and tossed the plastic away. There was also a lot of crinkly paper stuff surrounding the jams and jellies and crackers and cheeses.</p>
<p>"So Spencer knows how much you enjoy beef log?" Patrick grinned and took the thick stick of processed meat from the basket. He casually, obviously, stroked his hand up and down the shaft, biting his lower lip. But he watched Pete carefully until he laughed.</p>
<p>As everyone did when he came out of one of these episodes. Pete nudged him. "You don't have to treat me like glass, Patrick. I go into these fugues, but then I come out of them. I'm the same person. I wouldn't blame you if you skipped out. It's not like it hasn't happened before."</p>
<p>"Yeah that's not really what I do," Patrick replied. There was a little wooden cutting board shaped like a guitar with magnets where the frets would go and a three-pack of tiny, metal, weird-looking cheese knives wrapped in plastic. Patrick tore open the plastic and set the knives against the magnets. "I'd tell you to ask my parole officer, but he only shows up to bad humans who deserve to have their toes eaten." He broke open the package of crackers and tore the wrapper off one of the wedges of cheese, then put slices of the cheese on crackers. He handed one to Pete.</p>
<p>"I—ew. Toes? Gross." Pete bit into the cracker. The cheese had a sharp bite to it that woke him up a little more, settled him back into his skin. But the cracker— "Uhh, are we sure these aren't, like, dishwashing scrubbies?"</p>
<p>Patrick bit into his cracker and made a face so comically disappointed that Pete laughed again. "This tastes—"</p>
<p>"Corporate?" Pete finished for him.</p>
<p>"Soulless." Patrick turned against his shoulder and dropped his head down into Pete's lap. "Pull your pants down, I need to suck dick and eat ass to get that taste out of my mouth."</p>
<p>"Those are multigrain crackers. You suck my dick with those crumbs in your mouth and you'll sand the skin right off." Pete shoved him off and cupped his hand protectively over his junk. Patrick tumbled to the floor, laughing.</p>
<p>"I could put jelly on it to make it better?" Patrick squinted at the label. "Raspberry-Fig? Fuck, that's full of seeds. Whose idea was it to put the two fruits with the most seeds ever into a jam and call it a gift?" Patrick wielded the weird knife again. "At least the cheese is okay."</p>
<p>They curled together under the afghan, eating cheese and nibbling on little cocktail weenies that came out of a blister pack underneath the jam while Pete used his laptop to look up how to cook a ham on YouTube.</p>
<p>Pete sagged again, this time with real tiredness, and Patrick noticed. "Come on." He stood and pulled Pete to his feet to lead him towards the bedroom. "You need good sleep in a soft bed with an elf boner poking between your ass cheeks."</p>
<p>Pete knew better than to argue and it just felt nice to be taken care of. So he let Patrick put toothpaste on his brush and he blew toothpaste bubbles while Patrick made up a filthy, but lame, little ditty about sucking on things until white foam filled your mouth. Then he let Patrick strip him down and put him into bed where he worked his own hands under Patrick's t-shirt (which was Pete's old DePaul tee, which started out as an old girlfriend-slash-hookup's Kappa-Homecoming-something—there was a crown on it and glitter once, okay, and Pete really liked glitter almost as much as he liked stealing shirts from girls).</p>
<p>They lay together in the dark, Pete chasing sleep, but not really making an effort. The tension in Patrick's body told him Patrick wasn't sleeping, either. "People usually fade me out of their lives when this happens," he said finally, the confession easier in the dark. "They say they'll stick around, but there's only so many times anyone should have to put up with my brain-rot."</p>
<p>"It's not your fault. And they're not worth your time."</p>
<p>"I think—I'm <em>afraid</em>—that one day I'll fade away out of my own. Like I never belonged in this world in the first place."</p>
<p>Behind him, Patrick stiffened. He felt Patrick's hair tickle the back of his neck as Patrick shook his head. "No. That's not gonna happen." He slid his hands down Pete's arms and laced their fingers together. "Look. You're gonna—you're gonna go find out when Marcus is doing that next jam session thing. You're gonna go back into that shitty club and find the house band, and call your old music buddies. You're gonna take that notebook full of lyrics—"</p>
<p>"My notebook? Lyrics?" Pete leaned away.</p>
<p>Patrick followed him, his voice cutting into the darkness. "I found that old notebook of yours. You never said you wrote songs."</p>
<p>Pete frowned, the scared, not-quite-set jello feeling that settled in the pit of his stomach coming out of nowhere and terrifying, but not wholly unpleasant. "I don't write songs. That's just—I dunno. Crap that builds up in my brain. I have to spew it out every once in a while."</p>
<p>"That crap is lyrics. And those lyrics are definitely not crap." In the dark, Patrick began to sing. "I love you in the same way there's a chapel in a hospital. One foot in your bedroom and one foot out the door. Sometimes I take chances, sometimes I take pills. I could write it better than you ever felt it."</p>
<p>The shards of sunlight that had been piercing his submarine brain cut all the way through and Pete breached the surface, gasping for metaphorical air. He couldn't explain why his words sounded so much better—so much more real—coming from Patrick's mouth, but they did and it was magic so profound that Pete felt something crack deep in his chest.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I'm sorry again. There was a lot of sad in this chapter. The Pogues song I'm referencing is, of course, the Pogues' "Fairytale of New York" which is one of the songs I think most encapsulates Christmas. It's a not-fairytale picture of tangled lives and a long-term relationship between two people who couldn't quite make many of their dreams come true, yet couldn't cut each other entirely free.</p>
<p>I'm still kind of on track to wrap up things in Chapter 12, but I might need an Epilogue to really tie up all the loose ends. Unless the story takes a different turn--I don't know, I'm really not the one in charge here. LIke all of you, I'm just along for the ride with these two.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0012"><h2>12. a stitch away from making it</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Christmas eve sometimes feels like the whole world holds its breath.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This chapter ended up being a monster, so I divided it at the natural break. </p>
<p>Ehh, who am I kidding, this whole fic turned out to be a monster.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Christmas Eve started a...<em>careful</em> affair in the apartment. Pete was always a little exhausted, coming out of a bad patch, and he alternated between feeling pathetically grateful that Patrick was being so solicitous around him and frustrated that Patrick was being so solicitous around him.</p>
<p>Together they opened the YouTube video for how to cook a ham and while Patrick was ransacking his kitchen cabinets looking for brown sugar (found), maraschino cherries (fridge, because whiskey sours), and pineapple (a bust), Pete sat at the counter, diving under the paper excelsior in the basket, seeking hidden treasures (or abominations). "You know you don't have to treat me like a glass ornament. I'm not that fragile."</p>
<p>"There are two kinds of fragile, Pete," Patrick said. "Fragile like a flower, and fragile like a bomb." He gave Pete a sharp look. "Neither of them are weak."</p>
<p>"I really do get it, you know," Pete started, hesitant. "I'm hard to live with." He fiddled with the straw-colored paper shreds in the basket, smoothing them out, then rolling them up into tight little curls. "Harder to love. Not even easy to care about—"</p>
<p>"Hey now." Patrick interrupted him. "I could have just crawled into my own stocking and lobbed magic dust at you from across the room. You are very easy to care about."</p>
<p>"I hear that a lot from people who don't know me. Then I hit one of these and—" Pete hunched further down into the basket. "You think I don't recognize that trapped look people get when they realize I'm high-maintenance?" He pulled out a hidden stick of salami and tossed it on the counter next to the trio of red wax-coated cheese rounds. "Now you're being very careful around me. I haven't heard you make more than two dick jokes all day." He pointed at Patrick with the second charcuterie stick.</p>
<p>Patrick grabbed the hand holding the salami and deep-throated it, popping off the waxed-paper tip with a smack of his lips. "I was saving my best work for the ham." He gestured to the counter where the lump of rump perched in a nest of its gold foil outer wrap and the inner plastic liner. "I carved out buttocks. Now that's a ham worth slapping, isn't it?"</p>
<p>Pete narrowed his eyes. "You sure?"</p>
<p>"Hey, I know my spankable asses." Patrick turned the ham so that Pete could see the cherry he'd secured right at the center of the line he'd carved down the middle. "It's even got a cherry to pop."</p>
<p>He bent over the laptop. "But it does not have pineapple. This thing says we need pineapple. We should go to the gas station and see if they have a can of pineapple."</p>
<p>"I need to know you're not—"</p>
<p>"Pete." Patrick came around the counter and stood in front of him. He waited until Pete met his eyes before speaking again, and Pete really wanted to fall into that frozen-lake gaze. "You deserve to have your words heard." He leaned in and brushed his lips against Pete's.</p>
<p>Pete blinked, his chest suddenly tight.</p>
<p>Then Patrick grabbed the thick summer sausage from the pile of goodies (and not-so-goodies—neither one of them would forget the Crackers of Sadness anytime soon) and tucked it down his pants.</p>
<p>The relief in Pete was so intense that he lost feeling in his fingertips for a moment and the backs of his eyelids prickled. Patrick gave him an impish grin and strutted up to him, hips thrusting aggressively. "Come on, let's go give the guy at the convenience store something to stare at." He shrugged on his denim jacket and tossed Pete his fuzzy hoodie.</p>
<p>"You are not going out like that," Pete said, struggling through the thick fabric.</p>
<p>"Try and stop me." Patrick made a sudden dash for the door.</p>
<p>Patrick was not an elf given to a lot of physical exertion. It wasn't hard for Pete to catch him and body-check him into the door. It was easier still for Pete to drop to his knees and start mouthing against the sausage in Patrick's pants.</p>
<p>"Hey, that's—I'm jealous! Pick the winter elf, not the summer sausage!"</p>
<p>Pete undid the fly of Patrick's pants—using mostly his teeth—and then used a careful hand to scoop the summer sausage up and out of the way. Then he followed it up with another careful hand lifting and separating the real parts of Patrick he wanted access to.</p>
<p>Patrick leaned his head back against the door and groaned. "Fuck—Pete—you want—"</p>
<p>Pete swallowed him down and licked up and bit at the bare skin of his hip, grinning up at him. He waved the sausage he'd liberated from Patrick's pants. With a final swipe of his tongue over the head of Patrick's cock, Pete pushed to his feet. "Don't you want to show off for the guy at the convenience store?" He grinned again as he did up Patrick's pants. "Show him the real you."</p>
<p>As they opened the main door to leave, Patrick hooked his arm through Pete's. "That's something not many people ever get to see."</p>
<p>**</p>
<p>Pete's dad had never missed a chance to lecture him about the responsibilities of living alone. So the smoke alarm had plenty of fresh batteries and a full charge when it screeched out a warning that dinner, Pete and Patrick style, was done.</p>
<p>"Aaaah!" Patrick was pulling the ham out of the oven while Pete hit the smoke alarm's reset button with a broom handle, then used the bristles to try to wave the smoke away. "Just open a window before the whole building comes knocking!"</p>
<p>The words were no more out of his mouth than Pete heard an insistent thumping against the front door. Patrick fumbled the cookie sheet containing the ham from the oven onto the stovetop with a thud that splashed more of the glazey juices over the edge of the cookie sheet, this time drizzling onto the stovetop instead of in the bottom of the oven, where the puddle of sugary pineapple juice, brown sugar, butter, and the mystery contents of the "homestyle spices" packet merrily bubbled into a thick, smoky tar (which was the cause of the smoke in the first place.</p>
<p>Pete yanked the window open, then the door. "Hi, Mrs. Lao," he said before he even checked to see who it was—he knew his neighbor.</p>
<p>The elderly Vietnamese lady leaned back and coughed at the puffs of smoke that accompanied Pete out the door. "You burning down my apartment building?"</p>
<p>Pete shook his head ferociously. "No, Ma'am! Just a little trouble with our Christmas Eve dinner."</p>
<p>"The directions said 'pan,'" Patrick called out from the kitchen.</p>
<p>"And that's a cookie pan," Pete retorted over his shoulder. "It's the closest thing to what was in the video. We didn't realize it would make so much—"</p>
<p>"Ooze." Patrick popped his head around the side of the kitchen counter.</p>
<p>Mrs. Lao squinted at him and waved the haze away from her face. "Cookies are baked on sheets, boys. You need a roasting pan to hold in the juices."</p>
<p>Pete figured he looked as sheepish as he felt. "Got any good tips for cleaning an oven"</p>
<p>"Yes," Mrs. Lao said firmly. "Turn it off and wait until it cools down first. Burnt sugar I can stand, but burnt plastic sponge is ten times worse."</p>
<p>"Do you want some ham? It turned out better than the bottom of the oven. I think." He glanced at Patrick, who nodded.</p>
<p>"Yeah, it's only the bottom that's, uh, crispy."</p>
<p>Mrs. Lao rolled her eyes. "My daughter Jenny is coming to pick me up in a few hours. Of course, if she lived here..."</p>
<p>"Merry Christmas, Mrs. Lao," Pete said firmly.</p>
<p>The elderly woman tapped the door frame. "Don't leave the windows open too long. You'll catch cold. And remember the restaurant is open until ten tonight in case you need soup."</p>
<p>Pete closed the door behind her and leaned against it. The aromas of smoked ham and smoking oven went to war about two feet above his head, wreathing him in the fallout of burnt sugar and cooked meat. "So, uh, this isn't very festive according to your people, is it?"</p>
<p>Patrick tilted his head. "Not according to the current administration. I mean, a few Kringles back—you should have seen the carnage—" He trailed off at what must have shown on Pete's face. "Nevermind, it was a long time ago."</p>
<p>It was hard to forget sometimes that Patrick was an elf and not a regular person. Pete fished in the Xmas box and pulled out a pair of cherub-cheeked Christmas elf candles. The kind that looked more like what you'd find in a children's book or a department store display before Patrick had gotten hold of it. "So, uh, you won't be offended if I light these little dudes on fire? They smell like bayberry, which is better than burnt ham juice."</p>
<p>Patrick sneered at the angelic little golems. "Where do people get their ideas about elves? Honestly. It's like they don't read any of the stories at all."</p>
<p>Pete shrugged. "People see what they want to see, I guess." He avoided Patrick's gaze. "They do that with people with mental illness, too. As long as you wear a nice shirt and smile, nobody wants to hear you thinking about tragedy."</p>
<p>Patrick lit the tip-tops of the adorable elf cone-hats and the overpowering scent of chemical bayberry filled the room in short order. Pete shut the windows once they'd reduced the air to a faint haze and the worst of the burnt smell dissipated. Patrick stared into the candle flames, his face unreadable. "A costume makes great camouflage," he said quietly. "Until you need to be seen and heard."</p>
<p>After the ham-and-hot-mustard sandwiches (the hot mustard found in one of the other jars that Pete thought was jelly, but was considerably better than the weird actual jellies in the basket), the apartment refused to cool down. "I think we used that oven more than I have since I moved in. I did not know it'd make the whole place into an oven." So he and Patrick crawled out the window onto the fire escape and sat on couch pillows to watch the city at night. The quiet and cold seeped into Pete. "It feels like Christmas Eve," he said.</p>
<p>Patrick sighed. "Yep."</p>
<p>"Listen—will you get in trouble when the bells don't ring? I mean—they can't blame you for me being broken, can they?" Old guilts and new humiliations nagged at him, lingering in the back of his brain like the burnt-sugar smoke up near the ceiling. "Nobody wants the toy with the crack right down the middle, am I right?"</p>
<p>"Hey—I know a few things about toys," Patrick said. "You're not—I don't think I should have been sent to you in the first place, honestly."</p>
<p>"Yeah, I get it." All the truths that Pete could read in other people, from his ex, from his friends, from the way the flow of life broke around him and reformed again downstream, having missed nothing from his absence. "Nobody wants to keep pouring themselves into a cracked vessel."</p>
<p>"That's not it at all." Patrick leaned back suddenly. "It's not you—"</p>
<p>"If you say, 'it's not you, it's me,' I think I'll throw you over this railing."</p>
<p>"It's true," Patrick retorted as he got to his feet. "It's not about <em>you</em> being broken, it's about <em>me</em> being broken." He began to pace around the narrow fire escape landing, his feet making soft clangs against the metal grill. "You never asked what I was in for."</p>
<p>Pete searched his face carefully. Patrick's features were set and stony. He licked his lips nervously. "I just...figured it was...er, drunk and disorderly? Indecent exposure?"</p>
<p>Patrick huffed and rolled his eyes. "Okay, yeah, that was part of it. But you should see what Frank gets up to—nope, that's a different story." He bent down and tossed the cushions back through the window into the living room. "I...had an assignment...who was...who needed help beyond my reach."</p>
<p>It sounded so clinical, so emotionless. Like reading from a report. Or a police blotter. "I was formally reprimanded for dereliction of duty. They opened an investigation. Official findings were sealed, but I was charged with abandoning my assignment and sentenced to five years." Patrick turned his body away, his shoulders stiff and his back tense as he stared out into the alley and the wedge of city beyond it.</p>
<p>Pete took a breath. "What really happened?" Because if anything, he understood about 'sealed official records' and how they meant 'nobody wants to find out that behavioral boot-camp thing your parents sent you to was using "disciplinary methods" that the actual army had stopped using.'</p>
<p>"I didn't abandon my assignment," Patrick said quietly, carefully. "The party line from the current Kringle is that Christmas is about Relentless Joy."</p>
<p>"I remember you told me that."</p>
<p>"There's no room in Relentless Joy for grief. To him, Christmas was always gonna be a spear to the gut. Something about the season..." Patrick scrubbed a hand down his face. "It won't let me remember the details. What I should have given him wasn't a few smiles, or snowflakes dancing in moonlight, or deer eating corn out of the palm of his hand. I should have given him space. But that's not what our orders are." Patrick's voice flooded with bitter notes. "Joy to the World, whether you asked for it or not." He paused and silence filled the space between them.</p>
<p>Pete let the silence be, even though he wanted to hug Patrick until the bad memories were squeezed out of him. But he knew better than most how you couldn't just crowd out the bad parts unless you wanted them to bring the whole shelving unit down on your head.</p>
<p>Patrick drew in another shaky sigh. "I kept forcing the joy. Hot chocolate with marshmallows, candy canes, mistletoe, sentimental journeys back to home and hearth." He buried his face in his hands. "Every fucking thing that reminded him of some facet of the grief he couldn't let go. It was a blizzard of reminders for him and he couldn't—couldn't cope, he—" Patrick broke off in a sob.</p>
<p>Pete filled in the blanks on his own. "Oh baby, I'm so sorry." Guilt for his own behavior surged up—no wonder Patrick had panicked if he had a history like that. "I'm so sorry, I should have warned you that I get like that, but it's not—I have it under control." Now he did wrap his arms around Patrick's shoulders and let the elf soak his shirt. He pulled Patrick into his lap and rocked, there against the bricks of the building in the cold.</p>
<p>He would have stayed like that forever if Patrick needed him to.</p>
<p>Patrick drew a deep, shuddering breath before lifting his head again. He cleared his throat but the words still came out thick. "He didn't need Relentless Joy. He had no reason for it. What he <em>needed</em> was for Christmas to <em>land gently</em>. He needed to avoid all the reminders that he couldn't be happy about the holiday and why." His fingers tightened on Pete's forearms. "But try telling the Home Office that and they spit some statistic at you about ambient Christmas magic. Keep pushing it and they go to greater lengths to shut you up because we wouldn't want anybody to <em>question the Kringle</em> now, would we?"</p>
<p>Pete just held Patrick tighter. "Tell me about him?"</p>
<p>**</p>
<p>Patrick tried. He set his mouth and forced himself to find the careful words that would make sense of it—<em>nothing, no words, will ever make sense of what happened</em>—still, he had to try.</p>
<p>He waved his hands in front of his face to bat away the scattered thoughts that were trying to crowd in and override that weird core of certainty he felt about this. "He was—" his voice caught as he searched for words that wouldn't come. "I can't remember what he did, but I remember how he made me feel." He huffed out a humorless laugh. "Maya Angelou again. He made me feel like I was—supposed to love him. And I thought—no, I know—he loved me back. But he was half-doomed and I was only semi-sweet." Patrick's lip quirked up. "That one's you. From the notebook."</p>
<p>"Oh, Patrick." Pete took his hand and squeezed.</p>
<p>Patrick squeezed his eyes shut tight, tears leaking out between his lashes. "<span>He didn't see the bright spots, how many people he had. He couldn't see all the hands held out. Couldn't see—me."</span></p>
<p>
  <span>"I see you. I <em>know</em> you, Patrick. Ever since I smacked your ass that first night, it's like everything is better."</span>
</p>
<p>"I know I have magic at my disposal," Patrick said carefully, "But I didn't make you better. I <em>can't</em> make you better."</p>
<p>"That's not what I mean." Pete shook his head. "With you, I can...figure out where all the pieces are, even if I can't put them together."</p>
<p>Patrick took a shaky breath. "I try to remember him and—I see you." He wrapped his arms around Pete's waist and buried his face in Pete's neck, just above the inked thorns that circled there. "Not like—not like that, I mean—at the end. But like—the way you make me feel." He breathed deep, taking in the scent and warmth and taste of Pete's skin.</p>
<p>**</p>
<p>"Oh, <em>Patrick</em>," Pete said again. He wrapped his arms around Patrick and held him tight enough to keep them both from floating away. "You—I—You have <em>no idea</em> how much I—" For once, words didn't come. Instead, he kissed Patrick. Softly, with care, until Patrick was kissing him back, thick and syrupy, flowing into the cracked parts and broken places and hardening instead of leaking out so that by the time they turned molten, the kisses spilled over Pete's edges and back into Patrick's until they were both saturated with it.</p>
<p>Pete's fingers threaded through Patrick's hair as he devoured Patrick's mouth. "God—Trick—we have to—"</p>
<p>Patrick broke away for a shaky breath. "Y-yeah, okay."</p>
<p>Pete tripped as he climbed in the window. He fell onto the pillows and winced as his knees hit the hard floor through them. Patrick followed him down, pressing him against the fluffy mess of blankets and couch cushions. He went back to kissing Pete, first his lips, then down to his neck and to bite at the thorny ink draped over his collarbone.</p>
<p>But—"Too many clothes," Pete murmured and Patrick agreed, struggling to his feet. The denim jacket over the hoodie combination worked to keep the worst of the Chicago wind from biting through him, but it was really not easy to get out of. But Patrick gamely tried anyway, wrestling the damp fabric down and over his elbows where it promptly got stuck at his wrists. He flapped helplessly while Pete stumbled against the wall as he toed his shoes off.</p>
<p>But Pete righted himself and instead of helping Patrick out of his jacket and hoodie, he just looped Patrick's trapped hands around his neck and dove in again. They moved down the short hallway past the bathroom and into the second bedroom. Patrick finally got one hand free of the prison of his clothes and shook the other one until they fell all the way off as they made it through the door into the bedroom.</p>
<p>**</p>
<p>Patrick rushed to get to the prize, working his way down Pete's happy trail while tearing at the button of his jeans. "C'mon, c'mon, come <em>on</em>," he muttered, fingers fumbling with the zipper until the fly burst open under the pressure of Pete's hardness. "Yess," he hissed.</p>
<p>Pete, meanwhile, shoved Patrick's jeans out of the way, leaving his Grinch boxers tented impatiently and his jeans stuck around his knees.</p>
<p>"Nnngh," he ground out when Patrick exhaled hot breath over Pete's own unders. Patrick chomped down on the waistband with his teeth and dragged it away from hot skin. But then his hands tightened over Patrick's shoulders. "Wait—"</p>
<p>It was Patrick's turn to rumble a protest. He lifted his head from between Pete's thighs. "Whaa—?"</p>
<p>Pete dragged him up, which— "Mmf. Wrong direction. I can't go down on you if you're dragging me up."</p>
<p>But Pete wrestled him, ending up moving halfway down until he met Patrick in the middle and pressed their foreheads together. "Shh, Trick," he said, "I wanna—don't rush it."</p>
<p>He pushed Patrick down onto his back and proceeded to trace every magical freckle over his pale skin, and put some very Pete-centric marks in the blank spaces between. When he finished his journey, Patrick was a shaking mess of warm waves of pleasure and the best kind of sensory overload. "Pete—please—"</p>
<p>Pete's fingers stilled in their light tracing over the soft seam of his nuts. "Tell me what you want. I wanna give you everything."</p>
<p>Patrick shifted restlessly. "I—fuck, Pete—just—"</p>
<p>Pete's fingers drifted lower. "Would you—" He licked his lips and pressed forward. "Can I—"</p>
<p>Patrick nodded. "Yeah—yeah, I want it."</p>
<p>Pete rubbed his cheek against the inside of Patrick's thigh with a little moan. "I'll make it so good for you, Trick. I promise." He scrabbled at the nightstand and Patrick heard the pop-cap of the lube bottle.</p>
<p>Patrick threaded his fingers through Pete's hair as Pete's fingers fluttered down behind his sac. "I talk a big game and suck a mean dick," he said, "But—this—I don't do very often so—<em>oh!</em> Is that a—"</p>
<p>"That's two," Pete murmured, his voice vibrating the delicate skin there.</p>
<p>"Fuck, you're good," Patrick blurted out. He hadn't even felt the first one.</p>
<p>"I'm careful. I take my time," Pete said between kisses trailing up Patrick's chest. "Wanna make it so good for you."</p>
<p>Warmth pooled in Patrick's spine. "Make it soon, yeah? Think I'm ready now."</p>
<p>Pete's moves were smooth as he withdrew his fingers and rolled on a condom, adding more slick. "Tell me if—"</p>
<p>Patrick propped himself up on his elbows so he could meet Pete halfway. Pete bent between his legs, pausing at his entrance. Patrick nudged forward. The stretch and burn left him breathless.</p>
<p>"I've got you." Pete waited for his nod. "Feel so good, baby."</p>
<p>Patrick lifted his hips. "Go."</p>
<p>Pete sank inside him and buried his face in his neck. The warmth of his lips tickled the spot that made Patrick melt—<em>how did he know?</em>—and shudders wracked his body.</p>
<p>They moved together, Patrick finding the rhythm and doing the guiding while Pete took his cues. Kissing Pete became a priority at one point, then Pete leaned back and Patrick developed a sudden need to stare at Pete instead. The cords of his neck stood out as he threw his head back and the dazed softness of his features Patrick could have just gazed at for the rest of his life. "Pete—don't stop—"</p>
<p>"Come on, Trick." Pete breathed the words over his skin. Tingles like frost on a bright winter morning. He lifted Patrick's leg, changed the angle, and hit the spot and Patrick was coming. "So fuckin' beautiful," Pete murmured as he followed him over the edge. "Love you..." And Patrick—</p>
<p>Patrick heard bells ring.</p>
<p>The post-coital daze, the shimmering stars made of the Christmas lights taped around Pete's bedroom window, the warmth of being held, of being covered by (and covered in) Pete-everything had just enough time to sink into his skin before his ankle monitor went off with the bong of a church bell rung at a funeral.</p>
<p>"Mmf," Pete collapsed on top of him. "What the hell was that?" He threaded his fingers through Patrick's and brought their joined hands to his lips.</p>
<p>Patrick glanced down. The ankle monitor was dark and silent. The bells sounded again, clear, this time and higher in pitch, a descending major key in fourths this time, clear enough to be heard three states away. Patrick shook his head to clear the ringing in his ears—no, outside his ears.</p>
<p>"Wait—I know this tune—it's the Christmas Morning bells!"</p>
<p>"What?" Pete's weight kept him down as he tried to rise.</p>
<p>"In the movies—Christmas morning dawns and Scrooge finds his Christmas spirit, snow comes to Happy Valley, the bank manager knocks on the door and says the loan's been paid off—it's the Christmas spirit! The real one this time, not my dick."</p>
<p>Pete frowned. "Wait—does that—Hey what's—you're <em>tingling?</em>"</p>
<p>Patrick's fingers tightened around Pete's, even as he shoved away the first itches of the recall. "Oh, Pete—oh no." The pieces fell into place to the tune of "joyous" bells but Patrick heard only despair.</p>
<p>Pete lifted his head from Patrick's chest and blinked wide eyes. Patrick's body was already starting to glow. "Patrick, what's happening?"</p>
<p>"Pete, I'm so sorry. I—I have to go."</p>
<p>Pete's eyes widened. "No—no you can't! I haven't learned the meaning of Christmas yet! We still have time!" He cast around for the right words. "I didn't hear any bells!"</p>
<p>Patrick tried to stave it off by hooking one leg around Pete's waist, even though he knew it was futile. The physics didn't care about feelings. His lip trembled. "But I did."</p>
<p>The blue glow around Patrick flared and he started to dematerialize, the pull back to the Pole growing stronger. "Pete, I'm sorry. I really thought it was you but it was me all along—"</p>
<p>"What do you mean it was you?"</p>
<p>"I have to go," Patrick said, fighting the pull as hard as he could for a few extra seconds. "The Pole recalls me when Christmas magic reaches critical mass. I can't stop it."</p>
<p>Pete's eyes shimmered with sudden tears. "You can't leave me when I finally found you!"</p>
<p>"I love you." Patrick kissed Pete's fingers while he still had enough structural integrity to do so. "I thought you needed Christmas but you gave me so much more." He stroked Pete's cheek. "<em>You</em> are <em>my</em> Christmas miracle."</p>
<p>Blue light swept the room and when the spots stopped dancing in front of Pete's eyes, Patrick was gone.</p>
<p>**</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>My only defense is that the next chapter is coming. Trust me to take all the way through the spring equinox to get through a thing meant for the winter solstice.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0013"><h2>13. Hands up, ready for the boom</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>The week between Christmas and New Year's is one of those liminal spaces where time means nothing. Usually, it's a fun kind of break, a "lost week" of leftovers and extra cookies and the last hurrah before everybody makes those new year's resolutions they won't keep for more than two weeks. Except for the past year we've had where the whole damn year has felt like a liminal space. But for this elf and his charge that lost week is where you find the answers.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you for sticking around. This one's got extra meat. It really was just supposed to be the second half of the last chapter, but when Frank, Hayley, and Brendon made an appearance and wanted to help, I couldn't very well say no. And there are a LOT of cut scenes from this part. Once I gave Frank some stage, it was hard to rein him in. Several aborted rescue attempts devolved into shenanigans. Maybe I will share them over on my tumblr.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Christmas dawned cold and sleety and Pete was alone.</p>
<p>Patrick's clothes, those stupid elf-shoes, that awful bingo hat, were gone with him. Pete had checked as soon as the light faded. He tore his living room apart, then the spare bedrooms, then the kitchen. Except for the bottles in the recycling bin, it was like Patrick was never there.</p>
<p>And yet little traces of him were everywhere.</p>
<p>Pete made sure of it.</p>
<p>He dragged his notebook and pencil to every room where Patrick had been and scrawled and scratched down words and phrases. Many of them didn't make sense. <em>I'd shoot the sunshine into my veins. Lines of dust and sweat just to feel like you</em>.</p>
<p>When he crashed in the pre-dawn grayness, still writing, he didn't leave his bed. He buried his face in the pillow where Patrick's head rested and breathed in the faint scent of bourbon and balsam until he couldn't smell it anymore and scratched into his notebook <em>I'm holding out and holding on to every letter and every song</em>.</p>
<p>He pulled his notebook out from under the bed—the one he took into the dark with him—and opened to where he left off. <em>He says I'll forget him, that I'll bury him in memory but I will keep him locked up right here in the trunk of my mind</em>.</p>
<p><em>There's proof of him under my fingernails, and in empty bottles where his lips have sipped</em>.</p>
<p>He made one perfunctory call to the family in Atlanta, switching over to FaceTime to see the babies and avoid eye contact with his sister so he could miss the meaningful looks. After he hung up, he turned on the burning log channel and lit the stupid red and green Christmas elf candles on the counter. He watched them burn until their hats melted into pools of hot wax at their feet and their stupid smiling faces melted and his entire apartment smelled like bayberry and peppermint.</p>
<p>He opened the refrigerator, even though he didn't feel like eating, and found the leftover ham from Spencer's "Christmas Bonus" basket.</p>
<p>The entire basket usually goes to his mom (not as a re-gift, but just because she has more use for a whole ham than a single guy living alone does—she would put the ham in the freezer and it would come out for Easter). He had half a slice of ham shoved in his mouth before he tasted the slightly burnt-crispy bottom and remembered.</p>
<p>His mouth flooded with sudden saltiness, and it didn't come from the ham.</p>
<p>He stared at the half-melted face of the red Christmas elf—the one that had the plump cupid's bow mouth that reminded him of Patrick. <em>Freckle freckle what makes you so special?</em> "Way to go," he said out loud around a mouthful of ham and tears, "My Christmas spirit's dead on arrival."</p>
<p>**</p>
<p>Pete's used to being the post-Christmas afterthought, and this year is no different. He lived off leftover ham and cheese from the basket and even the Crackers of Sadness washed down with beer or coffee (and sometimes beer and coffee) for three days after Christmas until his parents came back from Atlanta. He spent most of the time writing down lyrics in one notebook, and cryptic messages to his future self about Patrick in the other. Patrick had said he would forget him, but Pete was still waiting for the memories to blur. Thus far, they remained as sharp and clear as a paper cut.</p>
<p>He forced himself to shower, dress, and make his way over to their house for the usual ritual of a quiet dinner of the three of them, followed by a football game on ESPN wherein his dad promptly falls asleep before the first quarter is over and before his mom has finished clearing up the dinner plates.</p>
<p>This time, though, after Pete showed his dad for the five millionth time how to get the game via the on-demand network, he slipped back into the kitchen and helped his mom wrap up the leftover chicken and put away the carrots and wash the dishes.</p>
<p>His mom beamed in surprised delight. "Thank you for helping, Peter. You know, we missed you this year, we do every year. You should really think of joining us. Your nephews need to know their uncle. You should see how big they're getting, why I was telling Hilary before we left..."</p>
<p>Pete, at the sink washing the dishes while his mother wiped down the table, heard Patrick in his mind rather than his mother from the dining room.</p>
<p>
  <em>He didn't see the bright spots, how many people he had. He couldn't see all the hands held out. Couldn't see—me.</em>
</p>
<p>Now Pete was seeing that maybe he wasn't the afterthought. He might <em>have</em> a missing piece inside him—moreso now that his apartment was empty of Christmas magic in the form of a short, drunk, irascible elf with a great ass and great lips and a great set of pipes if not a great repertoire outside of Christmas music. But he didn't need to <em>be</em> the missing piece in other people's lives.</p>
<p>He lowered his head at a sudden sting behind his eyes that had nothing to do with the hot soapy water in the sink.</p>
<p>A few minutes later his mom came back in with the washrag. "Baby, you have a sad way about you. Is everything all right?"</p>
<p>Pete wiped his eyes on his shoulder. "Yeah, uh, just, hot water, you know?"</p>
<p>She took his hands out of the dish water and peeled the rubber gloves off. "Leave the rest. Come sit and talk for a bit." She slanted a sideways glance at him, her gaze partially obscured by the lenses of her glasses. "Perhaps you can tell me about the nice young man who answered your phone a few days ago."</p>
<p>Pete's jaw dropped. "I—uh—"</p>
<p>She put her arms around him and patted his shoulders. "Baby, I'm not blind." She cupped his cheeks. "And the only thing I want to know is that he's treating you right."</p>
<p>Pete sat in his mom's parlor while his dad snored in the recliner and in fits and starts, it all came out. Edited for some of the more outlandish aspects and censored because she didn't need to know all the details to get the story. "But he had to go back home," Pete finished past a sudden lump in his throat.</p>
<p>His mom just hugged him and let him be sad.</p>
<p>When he reached for his coat an hour later, she handed him the bag of leftovers she always packed up for him. "You don't need a holiday to come visit us, Peter."</p>
<p>He kissed her cheek. "No, I don't, do I?" It hurt to smile, but he summoned one up for her. "Love you."</p>
<p>The warmth he felt from his mother's understanding had faded by the time he returned to his apartment. He trudged up the stairs and gave a half-hearted wave at Mrs. Lao when she popped out of her apartment at the noise. "Where's your friend?"</p>
<p>"He—had to go back home," Pete mumbled.</p>
<p>For once, Mrs. Lao didn't suggest a smaller apartment. She stood in her doorway, quiet, while he fumbled with his key and the swelling wood of the door frame. When he got the door open, she spoke again. "Pete."</p>
<p>"Yes, Mrs. Lao?"</p>
<p>"You should come down to the restaurant on New Year's Eve. We are having a little buffet. Just for friends and family."</p>
<p>"I—" He looked down. His New Year's schedule wasn't exactly full. "Okay," he said. "I'll stop down." He bit his lip. "Thank you for the invite, Mrs. Lao."</p>
<p>It wasn't until he was alone in his bed and had turned out the light that the hollow ache came rushing back, draining the light and life and warmth from him. He lay awake in the dark, staring at the ceiling or out the window of his bedroom to the weak light from the street. Once, when he might have finally found that twilight between awake and asleep, he thought he heard someone on the fire escape.</p>
<p>**</p>
<p>Patrick woke up naked inside a two-story bottle of Jaegermeister. <em>Fuck</em>, he thought, <em>must've been one hell of a party</em>. The green world he inhabited inside the bottle was coated with spent magic dust. So, come to think of it, was the inside of his mouth.</p>
<p>He searched his memories for any hint of how he got here. He didn't even know what day it was. He was ninety-eight percent sure that Frank was involved, and the other two percent were betting on Brendon. But wasn't there something else—</p>
<p>His head pounded. There was an ache in his chest. His joints felt wobbly, like the misfit toys that washed back into the Pole during the year And when he used the wall to crawl to a standing position, his bare skin squeaking up the side of the glass and clearing the residue, he saw that there was a hickey on his left tit. And zero idea of how he got it.</p>
<p>Everything outside looked green and wavery in the watery glass like he was stuck at the bottom of a lake. <em>Something about a lake...lake shore...lakeshore?</em> And everything inside, reflected in the smear along the bottle's curved wall, was distorted almost unrecognizable. Patrick staggered into his clothes and buckled on his belt, then blinked away the fuzz in his brain and stared at his blurred reflection and—</p>
<p><em>I like it when we blur together</em>.</p>
<p><em>Come back. Without you, I'm just me</em>.</p>
<p>No stranger to chasing fragments of memories into dead ends, Patrick closed his eyes. Where the hell had he been for the past—<em>What day is it? And why am I all the way at the bottom of the Jaeger bottle?</em></p>
<p>Something restless and undomesticated behind his ribcage told him to remember. That it was urgent that he remember. But he closed his eyes and saw amber, as if he'd been dropped into a whiskey bottle instead of the Jaeger.</p>
<p>The impression dissipated, chased away by a thump from outside. Something restless and undomesticated. In this case, Frank, his face mushed up against the outside of the glass. "Patrick!"</p>
<p>"Frank? He stepped close to the glass wall.</p>
<p>Frank peered through the glass. "Shove a pine tree up my ass, they used the whole bottle on you."</p>
<p>Patrick looked around. The giant bottle was indeed bone dry. So was his tongue. "What happened?" Two other elves came dashing up. "Brendon? Hayley? What are you guys—" Patrick shook his head, but it felt like cotton and concrete at the same time.</p>
<p>"Patrick! We were so worried!" Brendon pressed his nose up against the bottle. "They said you were sick!"</p>
<p>"Sick? I was—I just woke up." Patrick rubbed his eyes. "I feel fine. Hungover, but...okay." He tested his feelings. That restless feeling came back, frustration over not being able to remember coiling in his gut. "I've been unconscious</p>
<p>"Unconscious?" Hayley frowned. "They told us you were contagious."</p>
<p>"Con—tagious?" Patrick frowned.</p>
<p>He looked back at Frank, who'd turned away and was scanning the surrounding field, but even through the bottle glass, he could hear Frank mutter, "Only your ideas."</p>
<p>"My what? Frank, what's going on?" He stared in the same direction Frank was looking, towards the Toy Factory at the center of town. The red and green lights on the smokestack winked on and off.</p>
<p>Brendon tapped the glass. "Patrick, can you fly?"</p>
<p>Patrick rose up to the bottle neck. "Looks like it." He felt more than a little woozy, weighted down by the pressing need to remember something. He felt around his tunic and belt pouch, felt the reassuring weight of the Christmas ball and his Field Notes, and then for good measure, felt for his junk.</p>
<p>Still there. But he remembered a warm hand, calluses in strange places, broader than his own palming over bare flesh. Wait—he begged the memory not to leave, but might as well try to catch smoke.</p>
<p>Hayley spoke next. "There, two reds and three greens!" She pointed to the tower.</p>
<p>Patrick's three friends scrambled into motion. Frank whipped out a monstrous ring of keys. Hayley pulled a garden hose with a small pipe sticking out of it from where it was strapped to her back and Brendon undid the clips on his backpack and popped a seal on the side. It immediately inflated into a large, circular float.</p>
<p>"Guys, what's going on?"</p>
<p>Hayley shook out the hose and attached one end to the inflated backpack, which had grown to the size of a king-sized bed. Brendon took the end with the needle and flitted upwards. Frank pointed up. "Meet us up top. We're getting you out of there." Frank pointed upward. "Hurry. That was the signal for the drones to return to base for recharge. We have four minutes until the next squadron launches."</p>
<p>"Drones?" Patrick said faintly as Frank took his keyring and began chipping away at the wax lip on the bottle neck.</p>
<p>"Man, they did a number on you." He heard Brendon's muffled voice from somewhere up above the cork.</p>
<p>"He's been in there long enough to soak up the whole bottle, we're lucky he recognized us," Hayley said.</p>
<p>"Why haven't they switched this thing to a screw-cap already?" Thumps came from the cork at the top.</p>
<p>Squeaking, then a shower of cork crumbs as the stiff pipe broke through the cork. "Okay, Patrick? Pull your hat down over your ears, close your eyes, and grab onto the bottom of that cork. We're bustin' you out."</p>
<p>Patrick, still bewildered, did as Brendon said, digging his fingers in between the pressed cells of cork while he watched his friends flit up to the top of the bottle.</p>
<p>"On three," Frank said, his voice muffled by Patrick's bingo hat, whose integrated flaps had come down over his ears as good headphones ought to. "One, two—"</p>
<p>"Three!" The trio released their flying magic and plummeted down towards the inflated backpack. He remembered to close his eyes just before they hit the cushion.</p>
<p>A loud, obnoxious BRAAAP! echoed through the bottle, sending a rush of air in through the pipe. Patrick's ears popped and his tunic blew up in the sudden wind. The BRAAAP! slowed down into a PHBTHBTHBTHB and Patrick was smushed up against the bottom of the cork as the bottle filled with more and more air. The PHBTHB turned into a FWEEEE that squealed an ever softening sound as the pressure grew underneath Patrick's jaw until suddenly—POP!</p>
<p>Patrick, the cork, and the hose all flew up the neck of the bottle at high velocity, Patrick tumbling ass over teakettle through the air as the cork flew one way and he went the other.</p>
<p>Frank and Brendon jumped up from the deflated backpack and caught him before Patrick tumbled to the ground. As his friends gently floated him down and the trio started packing up equipment, Frank said. "I'm gonna claim that one and brag about it."</p>
<p>"Yeah, well, you better help me get rid of the evidence," Brendon retorted. "Or else the world's gonna know it was a whoopie cushion and you'll be pegged as a fraud."</p>
<p>Patrick followed the other three, helping to fold the whoopie cushion back into a backpack and holding the hose while Hayley coiled it back up and secured it across her body like a bandolier.</p>
<p>Brendon lifted his head like a reindeer listening for jingle bells. "Shit. Drones." The faint buzzing grew louder. He gathered up the backpack and Frank and Hayley each took hold of one of Patrick's hands and started running towards the Toy Factory's loading dock, Frank's keys jingle-jangling all the way.</p>
<p>"I don't understaaaand," Patrick whined. "I don't even know what day it is, or why I ended up in the bottle! I'm gonna violate my parole and Andy's gonna be so disappointed—"</p>
<p>Hayley stepped up to him. She cupped his cheeks with her hands. "Patrick, buddy, you've been pickled for a whole week. Someone here wanted you to forget everything including your name."</p>
<p>"But—why?"</p>
<p>She mushed his face. "Because when Home Office recalled you, you wouldn't stop screaming that you needed to go back."</p>
<p>**</p>
<p>Hayley, Brendon, and Frank were very understanding, sympathetic, and supportive friends, but none of them would tell Patrick why they were stuffing him in the archives. Or why they insisted he had to be up so high. "I am not now, and I refuse to ever be, an elf on the shelf!"</p>
<p>"That's too bad," Frank said. "It was like a sex vacation for me and Gerard when we took a turn at it. We had a threesome with a Transformer."</p>
<p>Hayley whimpered. "I wish I could go back in time to five minutes ago when I didn't know that."</p>
<p>"Can I fast-forward to the part where you guys tell me why you're putting me here?" Patrick staggered, dipping down two feet when Brendon handed him a thick set of leatherbound tomes Frank had pulled out of a large shelf behind a wire cage up near the rafters.</p>
<p>"Because it's the safest place to hide from the drones," Hayley answered. "They're going to be looking for you and the magical interference from the old records is the only thing strong enough to override their sensors until they recalibrate at midnight for the new year."</p>
<p>Patrick still couldn't believe it was New Year's Eve already. He'd been in the bottle for a whole week! Somebody really wanted him to forget something. He couldn't shake Hayley's words, either. <em>You wouldn't stop screaming, Patrick</em>.</p>
<p>So what wasn't he remembering? Why would he want so badly to go back when— Patrick frowned. There was an old hurt. An old, old, deeply-grooved hurt when he thought about the outside world. Something the opposite of Relentless Joy they were all obligated to manifest. An exhausted ache swept over him and he dipped from his hover.</p>
<p>"Easy, Patrick." Hayley flitted over to him and pulled him back up by an elbow.</p>
<p>Frank had cleared a space behind the books on the shelf, which was much deeper into the wall than it looked. The bound books fronted a space behind that was stuffed with sheaves of parchment tied with silver tinsel that had blackened with age.</p>
<p>"I don't know why they bother keeping this stuff," Brendon muttered as he took the loose-leaf and assembled it into neat stacks.</p>
<p>"They can't get rid of it." Frank's voice was muffled until he backed out, ass first, from the hollow they'd cleared out. "The oldest books are kinda feral. They'll let you take folio pages out but any attempt to destroy them or replace them with something different ends with an archivist in the infirmary, short a few fingers." He backed all the way out, his face a little sweaty. "Or half an ass-cheek. Bob still doesn't sit down quite right."</p>
<p>"Ouch." Brendon balanced the stack while he rubbed a butt-cheek in sympathy. "Most of this is pretty gruesome, though. Old Midwinter stuff." He peered down at the top pages. "Apparently, we're supposed to chant cantrips while bloodletting elderly sheep."</p>
<p>"Look." Patrick ducked his head. "The books weren't the only thing feral back then. We needed the iron—"</p>
<p>"I'm good with not knowing, thanks." Brendon cut him off. "You old farts are weird." He lifted his head. "You guys hear that?"</p>
<p>Nothing but the silence of the cavernous archives and the whispering of restless pages came to Patrick's ears.</p>
<p>"Get in the hole, Patrick." Frank pointed to the dark space between the books.</p>
<p>Patrick bared his teeth. "Whippersnapper." To Frank, he said, "I really don't wanna get in the hole."</p>
<p>"Get in the hole," Brendon said, changing out his bound books for a more modest sheaf of loose-leaf.</p>
<p>"You haven't told me what happens after I get in the hole." Patrick began to float back away from his friends.</p>
<p>"We're working on it," Hayley said. "I tried to pull your field reports to see what happened but they're not even in the system anymore."</p>
<p>Patrick patted his pouch (cupped his sac? Why was that funny and sad at the same time?). The stiffness there (why did that make him want to laugh <em>and</em> cry big hiccupy sobs?) was small and rectangular, with neat corners. "I still have my Field Notes. They probably never entered it, that's all."</p>
<p>Hayley gave him a disbelieving look. "You're more pickled than we thought. The notes are a direct interface with the Home Office system. They're entered as soon as you write them." She pointed to her face. "Watch my lips, Patrick. Somebody. Deleted. Them."</p>
<p>Patrick's tights bunched nervously under his suddenly-tight grip on the pouch. He felt his Christmas ball shift down next to his own balls. "But...why?"</p>
<p>Frank's lips formed a wry twist. "He says as if his last ruckus didn't land him in the klink." He put a hand on Patrick's shoulder and guided him towards the bookcase.</p>
<p>Patrick would have dug in his heels, but he had no ground in which to dig them and Frank's magic was, if not stronger, then at least less hung-over. The hole grew closer. "Wait!" He flung his hands and feet out, forgetting for a moment that he still had a handful of parchment pages, which crumpled in his attempt to grab the shelf.</p>
<p>One shelf over, a volume slid out and flapped its cover in protest. Hayley darted up and petted its spine, then re-shelved it with a soothing murmur.</p>
<p>Frank, on the other hand, was anything but soothing. "Watch that! I already called in all my favors with Bob to even let us in here."</p>
<p>Patrick's grip loosened and he tumbled into the hole. "Wait! What about Andy! If I haven't seen him for a week, that means I missed my check-in! I have to explain why!" Once Patrick was in around the edges of the books, the space between them and the back of the shelf really was quite roomy. Like a sleeping berth on a train car. <em>Or like the back seat of a van</em>.</p>
<p>Patrick wondered where that last comparison came from while Brendon's face darkened the entrance to the shelf. "Who do you think told us where you were?"</p>
<p>"Gerard," Frank retorted from behind him.</p>
<p>Brendon turned his head and huffed. "Yeah, but who told us he wasn't contagious?"</p>
<p>"And made sure he got his clothes back," Hayley piped in.</p>
<p>Patrick remembered waking up naked, struggling into his clothes. "I guess I have Andy to thank for that. I'm still gonna be in so much trouble and the pisser is that <em>I don't even know why</em>." He resigned himself to hiding in the bookcase until—whatever they needed to figure out was the next step, but he was damned if he wasn't going to stretch his legs out while doing it.</p>
<p>"Maybe that's for the best." Hayley's face appeared at the gap in the shelf. She passed through a little paper sack. "There's a snack, an Advil, and some water in there. I came in around the same time you did. You were pretty out of your head."</p>
<p>"And naked," Frank interjected. "Gerard said the team found his clothes in the wreckage. He's the one that got them to Andy." He started putting books back on the shelf.</p>
<p>Patrick clutched the little paper bag and figured he could breathe into it. "What's going to happen to me? I can't just—<em>live here</em> now."</p>
<p>"You can and you will," Frank said, filling in the gaps with books. "At least until the Jaeger wears off. We'll come back and check on you at sunset."</p>
<p>"Sunset? It's winter solstice at the North Pole! That's still two weeks away!" Patrick felt panic set in, even if it was still mitigated by the alcohol.</p>
<p>"The sunset <em>shift</em>," Frank said. "Gerard's getting off then and he's getting us through security to meet Andy."</p>
<p>Patrick used his feet to shove more papers over. Really, the amount of parchment, vellum, linen, and a little papyrus if he wasn't mistaken, made a nice little pallet. He could just sleep it off for a few hours. "Don't forget about me?"</p>
<p>"Patrick, we're your friends," Brendon said, his voice muffled by the books as Frank replaced the last volume. "We won't forget you. We're already remembering for you."</p>
<p>Patrick was kind of glad the hole was dark and the books were there, so his friends couldn't see how his eyes got suddenly leaky. He flicked his middle finger and summoned a tiny spark of light while he inspected the contents of Hayley's paper bag lunch. He washed down the Advil with the water and upended the bag to reveal— "Oooh, nut roll!"</p>
<p>The dense, sweet bread wrapped around the thick, honeyed nut mix filled him right up, even being out of commission and pickled for the better part of a week. He ate half the palm-sized roll and wrapped the other half up, just in case he was here for a while. He tried to sleep it off, but when he settled down, curled on his side, sleep didn't come.</p>
<p>He reached into his pants and pulled out his pouch. Field Notes, Christmas ball, stick—wait—</p>
<p>His fingers traced over the shape, feeling the branchlike texture, the press and give of berries lined up (plump red ones and smaller, tougher white ones), the leathery smoothness of holly leaves. A YulePod! "Andy, bless your horny goat heart," he muttered. He felt around the top end and found the juniper-berry earbuds and stuck them in his ears. How he knew Andy was responsible for the pod, he had no idea, but he knew it was Andy's YulePod and that Andy had played him something from it recently.</p>
<p>He let the light go out, preferring to use two hands in the dark rather than one in the light and found the buttons. He fumbled with them until he found the Play button and let his ears fill with sound to drive the dark away.</p>
<p>"And the boys of the NYPD choir are singin' Galway Bay," Kirsty and the Pogues' plaintive harmonies filled his ears—</p>
<p>And the memories exploded in his head.</p>
<p>**</p>
<p>Pete didn't feel like it, but he made himself go to the Lao's buffet. He talked a little with the delivery guy about his new Playstation. Mrs. Lao's daughter brought her entire brood and Pete ended up helping the adorable little energy bundles pull the strings for little plastic New Year's crackers. Their mom confessed that they were looking at a house in Schaumburg so Pete could feel free to ignore Mrs. Lao's plans to get him out of his apartment.</p>
<p>There were bright spots and laughs among his neighbors, but when the college girls passed out little candy-cane reindeer for everyone, Pete could only think of the snowflakes he and Patrick had cut out of coffee filters to decorate their bare little tree. Shortly after, he came back up to his apartment and popped the corks on some bottles a little early while he turned the TV to the Ball Drop.</p>
<p>God, Patrick would have so much fun with that. <em>Cup gently</em>, he'd say with a little hip wiggle. <em>Who wouldn't want an entire TV special dedicated to watching their balls drop, eh?</em> Pete's laugh echoed in the empty apartment and the end of the laugh caught in his throat.</p>
<p>The TV cameras flashed shots of a lot of people wearing glittery hats in bundled-up coats ringing in the new year an hour before it actually got to Chicago. He was pretty lit when it was time to count down. He wrestled open the window leading to the fire escape and had one leg out before he noticed that the light dusting of snow coating the railings and the grate had been disturbed.</p>
<p>Weird footprints, which made him think of Patrick's weird elf shoes. Then the fireworks started and the TV started playing "Auld Lang Syne" behind him. On the TV, people were kissing in the new year. Fuck, even the people in the next building over had their blinds open and were sucking face (that couple on the fifth floor were doing more than kissing). Everything seemed coated in green and red.</p>
<p>The fireworks became blurry flashes of pretty colored sparkles that smeared into blobs through his stinging eyes. On the TV behind him, the crew from Wake Up Chicago was chattering excitedly. "In an unexpected and completely un-forecasted turn of events, it appears that the Northern Lights are making an appearance over Lake Michigan tonight."</p>
<p>"That's right, Casey. The Aurora Borealis isn't usually seen this far south, but it has happened before, sometimes causing broadcast interference in radio and television so let's hope our New Year's luck holds out and our viewers get to see this amazing sight with us."</p>
<p>Pete tipped his head back and looked up. From the alley on the fire escape, he could only see a sliver of sky and a wedge of city at the end of the alley, but sure enough, the faint green and red glow came from the sky.</p>
<p><em>It's beautiful. Patrick, I wish you could see it</em>. He clutched the bottle of champagne he was supposed to be sharing with Patrick and crawled back in the window, slamming it shut.</p>
<p>In his bedroom, the blinds were closed, but the gaps still let in some of the fireworks and he stared unseeing at the flashes sneaking in between the slats. Every burst of light made him think of Patrick. Sweaty, eyes glowing with joy when Pete said, "I love you," surrounded by glowing motes that were so beautiful even as they stole Patrick from him molecule by molecule.</p>
<p>**</p>
<p>Everything that happened to him rushed back in.</p>
<p>The sublime feeling of contentment, of rightness, of <em>oh, there you are, I've found you</em> and the solid, hot body in his arms and inside him—</p>
<p>Eyes like hot whiskey, warm brandy...a smile that lit up brighter than the Main Tree <em>and</em> the lead Nose on the Sleigh...a laugh unfettered in its braying boisterousness—</p>
<p>Broad, strong, long-fingered hands that held onto a pencil stub for dear life while spiky letters and words sharp enough to cut without pain—</p>
<p>The memories tumbled and jumbled over each other, fighting each other to be the first one to get out of the distant, cobwebby corners of his brain.</p>
<p>Mixed in with memories of the sound and taste and scent of Pete Pete Pete, older impressions churned an aching sadness behind his sternum that felt downright ancient. Someone connecting with him for a brief, bright moment, then being ripped out by the roots between one breath and the next. Loose thoughts and disjointed impressions and the awful feeling of having forgotten something critical and then gone in an instant with an amber flash of light from Pete's eyes as he met Patrick's over a cone full of spiced nuts and bad puns.</p>
<p>Thank fuck he was stuffed into the back of a bookcase, in the dark and away from the drones. He wanted to slap his hands over his ears and scream and scream until he somehow screamed himself back to Pete's. But he couldn't scream and betray his friends, so Patrick stuffed the knuckles of one hand in his mouth and let the memories break over him, and <em>keened</em>.</p>
<p>
  <em>With you, I can...figure out where all the pieces are, even if I can't put them together.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>...Love you...make it so good...</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>You can't leave me when I finally found you!</em>
</p>
<p>The buds in his ears faded out the last strings of the Pogues song. He remembered Andy playing this for him when he last checked on Patrick in Pete's apartment. Patrick had been angry and scared then, and he was scared and angry now. Relentless Joy. "Fuck relentless joy," he said out loud.</p>
<p><em>You still play, right?</em> He heard Andy say. <em>Make bells ring</em>.</p>
<p>Around him, the parchment leaves rustled. The oldest books are feral, Frank had said. One of the <em>oldest</em>-oldest books was the songbook. <em>Holiday Songs for Every Mood</em>. Patrick scrubbed his hand down his face and the front of his tunic, wiping away the snot, then flipped his middle finger back up to summon another tiny light.</p>
<p>By the blue cast of the spark, he began searching through the books, pulling them into his nook by their corners to examine the titles. Third time proved to be the charm. "First edition," he breathed.</p>
<p>The book didn't like him handling it roughly and nipped at his thumb. "Hey," Patrick snapped. "I'm trying to read you."</p>
<p>The pages rippled and the spine stiffened, making each page harder to turn until Patrick came to the back section where pages and pages had been rendered blank. "What are you hiding?" he asked it.</p>
<p>On impulse, he flicked the Yulepod to speakers and turned the volume way down. He queued up the Pogues again and played a few seconds. "Can you show me where that one should go?"</p>
<p>This time he murmured to the book, patting its corners, stroking over the edges of the pages. "Show me the other songs. The ones they want you to hide."</p>
<p>The book rippled, indecisive.</p>
<p>"Come on, you know as well as I do—Relentless Joy is gonna end up hurting as many people as it helps." He closed his eyes and leaned down into the book. "I'm a singer." For good measure, he sang a phrase from Pete's notebook. "These are your good years, don't take my advice, you never wanted the nice boys anyway."</p>
<p>The book snapped open in a flurry of parchment folio leaves that turned so fast they ruffled Patrick's hair and nearly clipped off the end of his nose. The blank page flattened and words began to appear on the parchment, fading in and out with the book's effort to display them through the censorship glamour.</p>
<p>
  <em>Yule Shoot Your Eye Out</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>lyrics by P Stump, P Wentz, J Trohman, A Hurley</em>
</p>
<p>Patrick frowned. "No, these are Pete's. I just put them together. I don't have music or anything—"</p>
<p>The book flapped a page at him. Patrick clamped his mouth shut for a moment and looked at the musical notation. <em>It's a little rough and raw and there's only one line, but</em>— He squinted at the date. "Oh. That one hasn't been written yet."</p>
<p>The tiny, dense bead of stubbornness in his midsection began to warm up. "Show me another one? One that's been written."</p>
<p>The book flipped to one more page—gently, this time. Patrick felt like he and the book had come to An Understanding.</p>
<p>This song glimmered to life with much less effort. "If I cannot bring you comfort—Wait—I've heard this one." He pulled out the YulePod from where it had gotten stuck under his rear end and backed it up before the Pogues song. "Andy—he's a Krampus and I think he's the kindest Krampus anybody could ask for if their toes absolutely had to be eaten for bad behavior—he had it on his YulePod." Patrick pressed the play button and a clear female voice began the phrase.</p>
<p><em>If I cannot bring you comfort, then at least I bring you hope</em>...</p>
<p>The words grabbed him. <em>That's all I wanted to do for Pete</em>. Pete and— His memory stuttered again, the lost assignment blurry and faded. He wasn't Pete, but—<em>He sure felt like Pete</em>.</p>
<p>This time, he listened through the whole song. The woman sang about appreciating the time you have and the people you have it with. She was joined by a chorus of childlike sopranos in a light, allegretto interlude that reminded him of the real old-school midwinters, wild and dangerous. a male singer crooned a hopeful bridge in a major key, but one that spoke of walking with one's pain. Instead of covering it with a coat of 'Relentless Joy.'</p>
<p>The song crescendoed and came to rest "at the Closing of the Year." The book quivered, the words brightened on the page with the sheet music, and then faded again. The perkiness drained from the pages and they sagged, the spine cracking with the effort expended by the book to keep the page alive.</p>
<p>"Poor thing," Patrick murmured. He dug into his pouch and brought out the Christmas ball. "I bet you're hungry, huh?" He pulled the pin and tipped a little bit of the magic dust along the seam of the book, rubbing it gently so that it seeped into the binding.</p>
<p>The book perked up, fluttering open to page after page, showing him brief images of the songs that had been obscured. Sad songs, melancholy songs, songs that humans had been writing--were still writing--about struggling through lonely Christmases, quiet Christmases, sad Christmases where they missed their loved ones, hard-candy Christmases where the presents were few but the love was real. People needed more than Relentless Joy and when Christmas elves stopped giving anything else, they went and made their own versions of all the other holiday feelings. <em>Here</em>, he thought. <em>Here is all the real magic. Not the stuff at the Tree, but the stuff in their hearts and in their voices, their words and music</em>.</p>
<p>"You shouldn't have to hide so much of yourself." The book purred, sending up a cloud scented with the magical odors of old binding glue, ink, and library paste. "And neither should I."</p>
<p>**</p>
<p>Patrick eventually did at least doze off. He only knew this because he woke up to voices filtering up from the gallery below.</p>
<p>"The situation is highly unorthodox! You had one job—keep the elf in line! You're a Krampus, man! You're supposed to keep order!" Patrick belatedly recognized the voice of the Kringle. <em>Boy, he sounds different when he's not doing the roly-poly holly-jolly act</em>.</p>
<p>"My purpose is to dispense Just Consequences, not run the party line on political dissidents." The unmistakable clop-clop of Andy's hooves revealed his presence as much as his voice.</p>
<p>"Wentz was never supposed to be on the List! And for you to pull that bait-and-switch*—"*</p>
<p>Patrick's fists clenched at the mention of Pete's name. <em>I knew he wasn't supposed to be an assignment!</em> But—Andy? <em>Andy</em> entered Pete into the system?</p>
<p>"And Stump was never supposed to be in the Gulag. He told the truth." Patrick didn't have time to process the fact that Andy was responsible for putting him and Pete together before Andy's soft voice, low and sharp-edged, came to Patrick's defense. <em>Aww, Andy</em>...</p>
<p>"He mishandled an assignment due to negligence! Associating with other holidays—" And now Patrick was angry again.</p>
<p>"His personal life had <em>nothing</em> to do with his performance. And his <em>performance</em> had nothing to do with his case!" Andy—dear, sweet, soft-spoken, kind Andy—was losing his soft-spokenness and sounding more and more like a Krampus.</p>
<p><em>Wow</em>, Patrick thought. The archival gallery's acoustics really complimented the menace of an oncoming Krampus.</p>
<p>"You knew Stump's last assignment ended in tragedy, but you disavowed him when he asked for an investigation and threw him into Gift Wrap when he wouldn't shut up."</p>
<p>Patrick's whole body went hot, then cold, then hot again. Hearing Andy say it—<em>Andy</em> of Just Consequences, of stern fairness, the ultimate arbiter of whether or not Patrick could get rid of his ankle monitor (at least before his recall took care of it) made it real in a way that made Patrick want to cry in both rage and relief.</p>
<p>"Everything was on the up-and-up! There was a Disciplinary Committee. He served his time and Home Office was extremely generous about giving him another chance in the field."</p>
<p>"You were short a field agent and you threw him at it because he was there. And you were short-staffed because your <em>only</em> answer is 'more jolly' for every human when most of them just want 'less lonely.'"</p>
<p>"And you?" Kringle snarled. "You switched the files at the last minute. If anyone 'threw him at it' it was you!"</p>
<p>"No, I kept a bigger disaster from happening and put him where he belonged. Stump is short on Christmas magic. If I let you put him where you originally intended, his assignment wouldn't find the Christmas spirit and Patrick would have failed, and you would have had to cover up another failure of your 'Relentless Joy' policy."</p>
<p>The Kringle let out a sigh that was audible all the way up here near the rafters. "Stump was a—miscalculation on my part. I've corrected the error. I'll never allow him any contact with humans again."</p>
<p>Patrick's gut clenched. No contact with humans? A life here, at the Pole, forever?</p>
<p>Never seeing Pete again?</p>
<p>The Pole was his home, but without Pete, it was a prison.</p>
<p><em>I can't do this anymore</em>.</p>
<p>"And do you really think you've 'corrected the error?'" Andy asked. "Stuffed him into that bottle for an entire week?"</p>
<p>"He can make new Christmas memories to replace the unpleasant ones. Once we figure out the right dosage of the elfin dust to ensure his compliance, we can let him out of the bottle again."</p>
<p>Ensure his compliance? "Ensure my compliance?" Patrick's lip curled up in a snarl. "<em>Ensure</em> my <em>compliance</em>, Kringle?" He repeated himself, this time loud enough to be heard by the two figures in the gallery below.</p>
<p>The Kringle's pink-cheeked face turned up in alarm as Patrick came sailing down from below, probably a little too fast. He gripped his pouch tight, one hand inside of it, clutching the Christmas ball while his other arm was wrapped around the Holiday Songs For Every Mood (First Edition).</p>
<p>Andy, beneath his shaggy coat, looked much less surprised. "You look like you're feeling much better, Patrick."</p>
<p>"I was never sick," Patrick seethed. "I was pickled! But I sobered up enough to remember everything you wanted me to forget," he said to the Kringle. "And I learned some new things, too."</p>
<p>The Kringle scowled down at him. "How dare you! Who helped you?" With every word, the Kringle grew taller, puffed out his chest, like an inflatable Santa from Wal-Mart, only much more menacing. Underneath the jolly, the mantle of the Kringle still carried with it the memory of Old Midwinter and all the blood and hunger that went with it.</p>
<p>But Patrick was having none of it. "You <em>lied!</em>" Patrick shouted him down from under his chin. "This thing is <em>full</em> of sad songs! Ones that people keep writing, no matter how much joy you cram down their throats. People needed us to make all sorts of Christmas magic, and we failed them. <em>You</em> failed them!" He pushed forward, feeling the fear curdle in his gut, but letting the righteous anger overpower it.</p>
<p>The Kringle stomped his booted foot. "I am the <em>Kringle! You</em> are nothing but an elf! You're a worker drone. <em>Your</em> job is to execute <em>my</em> policy!"</p>
<p>"Your policy is wrong! But I'm gonna make it right," Patrick said, his chest bumping against the Kringle's belly (which did not, in fact, jiggle like a bowl full of jelly, unless that jelly was quick-set concrete. All sorts of things come in six-packs and bricks are some of them). "I'm leaving this place and I'm never coming back. I'll write bitter songs and angry songs and heartbroken songs because people need to feel those things, too. You will <em>never</em> put me in the bottom of a bottle again." He put the book in front of him like a shield.</p>
<p>It snapped at the Kringle and the large man stumbled back, falling on his rump.</p>
<p>Patrick cradled the book. "And I'm gonna set this thing free." He raised his Christmas ball.</p>
<p>"You don't touch that!" Kringle roared. "Krampus! Punish The Naughty!"</p>
<p>Andy bared his teeth. His hooves shot up sparks as he strode forward. "With pleasure." The Krampus took the Kringle by the ankles and tore off his boots.</p>
<p>Patrick only saw the Kringle's surprised expression (and Andy's fangs as he leaned in towards the exposed toes) for a moment before he brought down the ball and smashed it on the cover of the book.</p>
<p>The impact crater, it would later be told, left a radioactive glow around the Pole for weeks afterward.</p>
<p>**</p>
<p>Pete lay curled on his side, in sweats that hadn't seen the inside of a washing machine in at least six wearings, listening to Joe-from-the-guitar-store's tinny voice in his ear from a voice mail. "So hey man, I know I'm probably the last person you thought would call around the holidays and you're probably with your family or something but I can't get that idea of that band out of my head, and well, I met this guy—he's new to the scene and hasn't found a place yet but I thought if I brought him by maybe he could play a little of his original stuff for you. So look, I'm going to swing by your place. I know—like, who comes around a guitar store on the morning of New Year's Day, right? But like, I needed to be there and well—I'll tell you the rest of the story when we get there. See you in half an hour."</p>
<p>Pete let the voice mail hang up on him. <em>Get up</em>, he told himself. <em>It's New Year's Day. Bright spots</em>. He drifted a little more, but the little voice in the back of his head kept pushing him. Joe had been dancing around the idea of being in a band together full-time, but only casually. Yet that last time they met, Joe actually pushed him about it. Maybe Joe needed a bright spot as much as Pete did. He dragged himself out of bed and into the bathroom long enough to brush his teeth.</p>
<p>Patrick's toothbrush (red and white striped, like a candy cane) fell from the medicine cabinet. Pete stared at it, minty drool dripping from his bottom lip. He wondered how it was missed in the clean-up that was supposed to be happening to him. He should throw it away, move on. But he spat, rinsed his mouth, and put the toothbrush back next to his in the holder.</p>
<p>The scent of coffee hit him next as he put together the pot. On the TV, the morning show people were talking about the amazing light show over Lake Michigan last night. "Last night, thanks to a sunshine riptide in outer space and some unusual activity at the North Pole, the Aurora Borealis came to visit Chicagoland! Just after midnight, reports came in from partygoers on Lakeshore Drive that described unusual green lights in the skies over Lake Michigan."</p>
<p>Pete fixed two cups out of habit and tried not to think of dirty-minded Christmas elves who'd undoubtedly have an explanation for northern lights that would keep him up nights. He tried not to see that shade of green from the center of a pair of eyes dancing with mirth just after making a dirty joke. Someone pounded on the door, jolting him out of the sudden lump in his throat.</p>
<p>He heard Joe's muffled voice and Mrs. Lao, in a Christmas miracle in itself, laughing. Why hadn't Pete ever invited Joe over here? A few moments later, Joe was thumping on his door. "Wake-up call, Wentz! Grab your socks and drop your—"</p>
<p>Pete jerked the door open. "Finish that sentence, Joseph, and you'll be paying my rent for the next three months." He didn't really feel like being super-sociable but—bright spots. And there was Joe, filling the doorway with a mass of hair like a mushroom cloud and wide blue eyes above a beard that had finally started to fill in. "Look at you! You've got a big-boy beard now!"</p>
<p>"Fuck you." Joe shoved a guitar case at Pete and shoved his way into the apartment. "So this is the infamous Pete Wentz, Gentleman Asshole of the Chicago softcore scene and all-around pain in the ass but just charming enough to get you to indulge him."</p>
<p>Pete gave way to Joe's whirlwind entrance, barely registering someone behind him, bundled up in layers and topped with a knit beanie on a lowered head that came up just to Joe's shoulder. "What, are you starting the Behind the Music tragedy? We have to get famous first. And we have to form an actual band."</p>
<p>"That's where this little dude comes in." Joe left Pete holding the guitar case and turned. In a flurry of arms, he dragged his companion forward. "Dude's new to the scene and just blew into town from up north and—"</p>
<p>The little dude lifted his head.</p>
<p>Hot whiskey met frozen lake under the Northern Lights.</p>
<p>Pete's breath sublimated into ice somewhere in the Arctic circle.</p>
<p>"Patrick Stump," Joe proclaimed as if that explained everything.</p>
<p>Pete was still struggling to breathe. The guitar case slipped and landed on his toes. He didn't feel a thing.</p>
<p>The denim jacket still hugged shoulders built up from doing time wrapping gifts for half a billion kids of all ages, only underneath it, the parti-colored tunic-slash—hoodie had been exchanged for an argyle sweater.</p>
<p>From under the green knit beanie and behind horn-rimmed glasses, Patrick bit his bottom lip. "Hey."</p>
<p>**</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I hope you enjoyed our little romp with drunk and dirty elves, gutter guard salesmen with their minds in the gutter, bad puns, and rotten holidays. The song that Patrick discovers on the YulePod is from the Robin Williams 1992 movie, "Toys." It's called "The Closing of the Year" and it's by Wendy and Lisa (whom you may know from their days in the entourage of none other than Prince himself. It's really quite lovely and should have much more radio play than it does. The genius lyrics are here: https://genius.com/The-musical-cast-of-toys-the-closing-of-the-year-main-theme-from-toys-lyrics and the song itself is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paoX7MkKOf8 And I'm at @glitterandrocketfuel over on tumblr--come say hi!</p>
<p>While most of this is tongue firmly in cheek, it's still a very real thing to recognize that the holidays are not easy for a LOT of people, and they may never be. Everything is magnified around the holidays, including stress and grief and sadness, and for some folks, the best gift is for those holidays to land gently. If you're one of those people, may they always land gently for you and may you have the space to experience your holidays as you need to, rather than how others want you to.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0014"><h2>14. Epilogue</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>After the happily-ever-after, the rest of the story begins...</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Okay, I fudged it a bit with the early history. Things all worked out in the end, didn't they?</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Epilogue</p><p>Christmas magic is still Christmas magic. Interventions provided by Home Office end with a successful injection of Christmas Spirit (TM) and the nature of the intervention and any supernatural elements or influences used melts from memory by the time the first crocuses start peeking green shoots out of the ground.</p><p>Every time Patrick told the story of meeting Pete for the first time, a detail changed here or there. "From the North" became "the Northern suburbs" and his own memories of the Pole morphed into a suburban blur, his incarceration a stint in an average suburban American high school (the two being not much different fundamentally). Pete never contradicted him, no matter how the story kept evolving.</p><p>Pete wrapped himself around Patrick, fitting him into all the blank spaces between the bright spots, and wrote lyrics about him in notebooks and on paper napkins and tucked into guitar cases and shoved under doors of the apartment the three of them now shared.</p><p>Pete and Joe and Patrick spent a lot of time fucking around with music (and sucking a lot), and with every ear-flick Joe subjected him to, Patrick's ears lost a little more of their pointiness. People remarked about the "cool Northern Lights" seen on that New Year's Eve, because that could occasionally happen as far south as northern Illinois, and as far as any official records went, it was just really neat reflections of the aurora borealis over Lake Michigan and if a few three-eyed fish washed up on shore in Wisconsin, well, the lake wasn't giving up her secrets.</p><p>Marcus at the record store heard them at a house party and it wasn't long before they started seeing his face at more than one place. Other faces joined his, many of them lending helping hands as they acquired equipment, shaking those helping hands as they introduced the boys to other helping hands that worked mixing boards and recording equipment, and a demo tape was born.</p><p>The night Pete's couch finally broke all the way was the result of something else that blew down from the North. In this case, it was a ginger-haired beast of a drummer with a voice that sounded like a sugarplum faerie and an attitude that brooked no shenanigans from naughty children. Even if those children were legal adults and free speech protected their right to spew fascist and racist insults, their discomfort in doing so around Andrew Hurley convinced them to stay off his Naughty List.</p><p>Somehow, though, everyone knew Andy Hurley even if they didn't <em>know</em> Andy Hurley. Pete remembered him from...somewhere? Joe knew the legends about Hurley and swore he'd seen the guy play, and even Patrick knew the guy could pound skin like nobody's business (and for some reason, he was very motivated to be on his best behavior around the scruffy-looking drummer). So when Hurley said, "Yeah, come up to Milwaukee and I'll lay a few tracks with you three when you have studio time," they did.</p><p>And if Hurley had been caught once or twice scratching his temples with drumsticks and Patrick thought he spotted some lumpy bits poking through his mop of ginger hair there out of the corner of his eye, well, it was probably because Hurley was a big Lord of the Rings fan.</p><p>Laying a few tracks turned into playing a few shows and one of them was attended by a dude in a leather jacket who said the words, "Fueled by Ramen" and then called Pete the following day. Pete had him on speaker and more magic words were said and four boys were very calm and polite until the line went dead, then they screamed their heads off, grabbed at each other, and all fell on the couch together. The poor couch could only take so much.</p><p>They immortalized it on the cover of their first album.</p><p>What the other three didn't know is that Pete didn't get rid of that couch. He kept it in a storage unit with a lot of other crap he couldn't throw away. The Gutter Guard demo box and supplies after he told Spencer, "Quit this shit, man. Go to Vegas. Chase a dream, show that kid of yours that it's okay to think big and not settle. Get busy livin', or get busy dyin'."</p><p>The box of "Xmas Crap" with his mom's old craft supplies that he couldn't bring himself to get rid of, yet couldn't quite remember why. Tucked in the box was a battered notebook with a page inside it that said, "I think I dreamt you," a pressed-flat paper cone that still smelled like spiced nuts, and a coffee-filter snowflake taped to the page.</p><p>And way at the bottom, under the string of lights that only half worked, was a single, delicate Christmas ornament Patrick had given him about a week after they met. It was half full of some kind of glitter or dust and in the rare times Pete visited the storage locker and its contents, he'd peek into the box and brush his fingers against the glass surface. He always handled it gently, something telling him that "fragile" in this case wasn't weak-fragile. His fingers tingled when he touched it, and if he listened very closely and was very quiet, he could almost hear bells.</p><p>**</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>There's a postscript with the fanfiction factory crew, but I haven't mapped out the implications quite yet. Thank you for reading all the way through to damn near April for a Christmas fic. I hope it was worth it and that I delivered.</p>
        </blockquote><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Special thanks to the Peterick Creations Challenge elves who work diligently to provide us with delicious Peterick content all year long. Especially in the dumpster fire that was 2020, where we all needed some serious escape. A tinfoil hat-tip to the Discord and the Slack without whom this past year would have been much darker. Come find me on tumblr: @glitterandrocketfuel !</p></blockquote></div></div>
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